I can’t stand 100 word stories. What are you even supposed to do with so little space? There’s no room for establishing a setting, fleshing out characters, or creating a satisfying conclusion that’s actually distinct from the beginning. I see advice online about how to write them, piles of moving biographies students have submitted to writing contests. They’re all assuming I’ve already found a starting point for the story. Every idea I’ve thought of has proven impossible to compress into such a puny paragraph without twisting the original idea into one that I can barely recognize. Hey, wait a minute.

It’s not an original observation to make, but why is the school mascot a duck? Sure, the “Crimson Tide” isn’t a very easy concept to make a mascot for, but that just begs the question of why we even picked it. The Alabama Crimson Tide has been using the name 5 years longer than us (1892 for them compared to 1897 for this school), so we just look like a bunch of posers from a state with worse winters. Regardless, Tidey is still stuck paddling in a crimson tide, all alone. I wonder what he thinks about it. Poor, poor guy.