Balderdash! Presents...Watercolor Wednesdays

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Burnout

Well, folks. We’ve finally done it. The entire staff here at Balderdash! has completely burned out. We’re broken, betattered, frazzled, fatigued, and nauseated from excessively chain-chomping cheese in order to fill the various voids at our core. If we keep going on at this pace, we’ll inevitably shatter into a million-billion pieces, splatter into a million-billion puddles of sludge. And our cleaning service charges extra for that sort of thing.

In order to preserve any meager shreds of sanity we have left, we are going to ***temporarily halt our famous “Watercolor Wednesdays” series*** for the time being. The Sunday Balderdash! items will still continue to pollute your e-mail inbox until our sketchbook and pens are pried out of our cold, dead fingers. But we need to grant ourselves a little space and grace during the week to sort ourselves out.

That being said, our wonderful subscribers are deeply important to us. We appreciate your continued support, comments, messages, and patience with our shenanigans. That’s why we wanted to take this opportunity to give you a little behind-the-scenes look at all of the intellectually taxing, creatively draining, and physically exhausting projects our various departments are working on. Just to give you a sense of how we’ve overcommitted ourselves lately.

Down in the Department of Technophobia, our team of paranoid luddites is hard at work on a cure for the A.I. pandemic plaguing our creative and academic communities. Using a pioneering admiration for an underused natural resource—the human brain—we hope to announce a solution to fanatical obsession with artificial intelligence in art and writing before summer.

Over in Advanced Poetics, our finest versers are developing a form of doggerel that will simultaneously trigger a paradigm shift in how our culture views rhyme AND make you pee your pants with laughter. If all goes according to plan, our poems will also double as a renewable energy source.

The researchers in the Existential Dread Lab are certain that nothing matters and that everything is rapidly coming to an end. Unless, of course, everything ALREADY ended and those of us who “remain” are merely the phantom-shadows of a species in a decades-long denial about its own expiration.

Our Marketing Department is mostly made of up Gen Z vermin. All of their work hours are spent scrolling YouTube for tutorials on how to do marketing. But in the end, they wind up rewatching clips from Euphoria. None of them have personal time left, but they’ll be out sick on Friday.

The folks in Cult Following Development are burning the midnight oil (and one or two sacrifices to the elder god Chubbleroth) to figure out how to get Balderdash! more subscribers. But they’ve used up most of their budget. To raise additional funds, they might start a Kool-Aid stand.

So! As you can see, we’re quite overburdened these days. While it pains us to take a break from “Watercolor Wednesdays,” we’re excited to continue to bring you what nonsense and aggravation we can in our main Balderdash! A Weekly Sketchbook newsletters. Stay tuned! We’ll see you on Sunday.