Publisher: 100 Word Stories
Weekly Challenge: 177
Topic: Peas in a pod
Submitted: September 7, 2009
Published: September 19, 2009
Participants: 14 total
Recommended Topic:
The professor guided his android daughter, Sally, into the cloning machine. He closed the door and turned it on. The machine started making loud noises until it came to a complete stop.
Sally stepped out of the machine. Then, Sally stepped out of it again. The two girls were like peas in a pod. He couldn’t tell one from the other.
The two girls looked at each other, and then looked at the professor. They giggled and then pushed him into the machine and ran it in reverse.
The professor came out, only half the man he used to be.
About the 100 Word Stories Weekly Challenge
About the 100 Word Stories Weekly Challenge
100 Word Stories
…And, as always, keep it brief!
The 100 Word Stories Weekly Challenge was (and still is) hosted by Laurence Simon—better known in Second Life as Crap Mariner—who built a wonderfully strange, tight-knit community around storytelling discipline.
Originally, he started a daily random theme on ScriberOptics via 100words on May 13, 2005, based on a photo, using a combination of everyone’s submitted words rather than posting a single topic. He would write short 100-word stories featuring recurring characters, such as Abraham Lincoln and the Mustard Man.
In June 2005, he then spun the stories into their own subdomain from his personal blog at podcasting.isfullofcrap.com, featuring multiple authors and guest entries. Rather than daily challenges, he settled for weekly challenges, which were due on April 21, 2006, for the topic “Bunnies!” It was published on April 22, 2006. He continued each week posting a topic and invited people to write a story of 100 or [sic]Less Nessman 2.0 words long. Most participants went for exactly 100. It was a form of microfiction—a subset of flash fiction—where the limitation wasn’t restrictive but creatively freeing. Within those 100 words, stories could be funny, heartfelt, surreal, absurd, reflective, or unexpectedly powerful.
Laurence encouraged contributors not just to write but to perform. He always invited people to record themselves reading their stories and send in the audio so their voices could be part of the experience. If someone didn’t—or couldn’t—he gladly read their story for them. Sometimes he even used software to alter his voice, adding character variety, humor, or dramatic flair, so every episode felt like a small production rather than just a reading.
The project chose to respond to the creative emptiness of podcasts at the time not with cynicism, but with creativity. Laurence filled the internet with humor, storytelling, discipline, and imagination. Eventually, the project continued under his broader creative umbrella, “One A Day Until I Die,” where he continues to celebrate the joy of storytelling in all its weird and wonderful forms.
Episodes usually feature everyone’s submissions together in one podcast, and listeners vote on their favorites. The weekly winner not only gets bragging rights but also the honor of choosing the next topic—meaning the community itself shaped what came next. Many participants came from overlapping creative spaces: writers, musicians, podcasters, and especially people in Second Life, where the challenge became something of a shared cultural experience. It wasn’t just a writing exercise; it was friendship, collaboration, creative play, and a small but meaningful part of internet history.
I even had the chance to meet Laurence once at the Second Life Community Convention, where he was handing out refrigerator magnets promoting the podcast — including one I still have today on my fridge. It’s a little artifact from a wonderfully weird, wonderfully human creative era.
This project mattered. It still does.
Paper/Wood Floor Theme from an old version of 100 Word Stories Circa 2009
Reflection
December 28, 2025
This story was part of Weekly Challenge #177 with the topic: Peas in a pod. I recorded and submitted the audio on the evening of September 7, and it appeared alongside nine other entries when the challenge was published. Like many of the challenges, the fun wasn’t just in writing exactly 100 words — it was in turning something small into something imaginative, strange, and entertaining.
I handled audio in Audacity, added environmental effects such as electric zaps, movement sounds, and giggles, layered background accompaniment created in Microsoft Songsmith, and exported the audio using the LAME MP3 encoder.
But this story didn’t just stay as audio.
Not long after submitting it, I turned it into machinima — a short animated video created inside a virtual world. I built the props, staged the scenes, and animated the characters to bring the story visually to life. The professor wore a blue lab coat. Sally was a bright pink robot. And the cloning machine itself was a large contraption with glowing panels and illuminated buttons.
The look wasn’t accidental. The color scheme and visual style matched Dedric Mauriac’s Gadget Shop, a brand and in-world store that I created and owned in Second Life. The bright blue aesthetic became a recognizable signature, so weaving it into the video wasn’t just convenient — it felt like part of my creative identity.
To handle camera movement, I used a 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator (then priced at $59), which let me pan, tilt, and rotate with one hand for smooth, cinematic motion. I captured footage with FRAPS and edited it in Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum Edition. The finished machinima was about 44 seconds long, which sounds tiny — until you remember the long-standing machinima joke:
Every second of machinima equals about an hour of work.
That estimate… feels painfully accurate.
I uploaded the final video to YouTube and shared it via TubeMogul, which then posted it to Google Buzz on February 11, 2010. Much of the filming actually took place in OpenSim, a Second Life–compatible emulator platform that gave me more control, less lag, and a better production environment.
Looking back, this little 100-word story became much more than a submission. It evolved into a miniature film project, a technical experiment, and another creative milestone in the strange and wonderful world where writing, virtual worlds, creativity, and personal branding all happily collided.
