That Happens

We're wrapping up our coverage of the classic 6-episode anime FLCL (Fooly Cooly) on Anime Binge Club, and Spencer and Kevin have a lot to say about robots, aliens, and the crushing weight of adolescence. After Spencer accidentally swears on YouTube (twice), forgets the show's name, and loses his fidget toy, we dive into the finale with the enthusiasm of someone who just had a guitar pulled out of their head.

Kevin confesses he found the ending confusing, which surprises absolutely no one, and Spencer responds by delivering an impressive breakdown of the entire plot involving space pirates, NO-powered brains, and a giant iron trying to flatten the planet. We debate whether Haruko is basically Bugs Bunny with a vespa and a spring-loaded boxing glove in a very uncomfortable location. Spencer also traces the origin story of his beloved character The Spleen back to a Twitch DJ persona called DJ Horny Smooth, and somehow it all makes sense.

Along the way we cover the dual meaning of hate symbols, the South Park animation cameo, why cocking a gun and feeling cocky might be etymologically linked, and why the show is secretly about emotionally unavailable parents and small-town adolescent stagnation. Spencer gets deep, Kevin gets confused, and Spenpai gets HR-flagged again. We also debate whether Superman flying out of someone's house is canon. It is.

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This week we've got a surprisingly lengthy debate about what "pomp without circumstance" actually means. (Spoiler: it's absurdity. The Spleen has strong feelings about this.)

From there we spiral into our wheelhouse: the discourse around Graham Plattner's apparent fascist-adjacent situation and what it says about Maine's famously unclassifiable political identity, why the "this is not who we are" crowd are doing everyone a disservice, and how understanding why people become Nazis (racism, it turns out.. not that complicated) can actually reduce your emotional suffering. Spencer also revisits the 9/11-as-unique-tragedy conversation and makes the argument that Americans' inability to see their suffering as part of a global pattern has caused enormous downstream damage.

We also cover: TikTok's hidden "Farlands", a creepy unlisted corner of AI-generated nightmare content that is somehow better than normal AI output; why AI might actually be most useful when it's making deeply disturbing uncanny valley content rather than generic slop; the depressing lifecycle of corporate loyalty and how Spencer's manager's lifelong single-employer career might explain an entire dysfunctional workplace. We also discuss loneliness, the ADHD "object permanence for people" problem, and solving every problem alone since childhood.

We read listener mail, including heartfelt thanks, an emergency pants-exchange situation involving a missing house key, and the extremely fair note that Spencer spiraling about the podcast being bad is the only part of the podcast that's actually bad. We close, as always, with a word from our "sponsors": a very detailed, very earnest advertisement about pelvic floor dysfunction that Spencer found on TikTok and decided all of you needed to experience. You're welcome.

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Spencer opens by casually mentioning that Spenpai is stuck in mandatory HR training after some "incidents," which is a sentence that raises more questions than it answers. Spencer soldiers on with Kevin, and the show kicks off with him describing in visceral, increasingly disturbing detail how he sliced his thumb open while cutting a Costco rotisserie chicken with entirely the wrong knife. Just when you think the medical drama is over, Spencer reveals he then contracted shingles, which he has traced directly to a catastrophically awkward lunch that sent him spiraling for three straight days. He makes a compelling case that social anxiety can, in fact, cause viral flare-ups.

Between doctor's notes and nerve pain, Spencer has apparently been home watching anime, and boy does he have thoughts. He gives enthusiastic breakdowns of Beastars (anime for furries where a wolf has complicated feelings about a rabbit) and Orb: On the Movements of the Earth (anime where people get executed for looking at stars), before we dig into FLCL episodes three and four. Kevin and Spencer discuss cat ears, school plays, parental affairs, robots that need to use the bathroom, the Eva parallels, and what it all means about being a teenager who suspects adults are frauds. We round things out with a breathless recap of the Arlong Park arc of One Piece, which somehow involves a fish man pulling out his own teeth, a woman stealing everyone's wallets, and a coward setting someone on fire with rubbing alcohol. It all makes sense, somehow.

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We kick things off by accidentally introducing the wrong show, arguing about Bonnie Tyler lyrics, and discovering that turning away from the camera reveals a wall-to-wall penny situation nobody knew was there.

From there, things get real fast. Spencer is having kind of a rough go of it: missing his ex, stuck on video game programming, smoking too much weed to feel high anymore, but finds unexpected joy in the philosophical similarities between Minecraft and coding. The conversation meanders through THAC0 (the famously cursed old Dungeons & Dragons combat mechanic), the surprisingly cherry-forward nature of Mr. Pibb, Kevin's deeply controversial love of RC Cola, and a Diablo 4-branded Fanta that Spencer considers one of the great sodas of our time.

We also wade into the current state of society: the FBI finding reports "credible" while nobody does anything about it, data centers making people on Threads suspicious for reasons that make no sense, the Goonbug mobile game phenomenon and the observation that the American Dream has quietly pivoted from "be a doctor" to "get hit by a truck for a settlement." Spencer also delivers a passionate sermon about labor vs. ideas, and the whole thing wraps up with an AI-generated email reply, a fantastic Hulk Hogan impression, and Spencer encouraging listeners to run him over with their cars as a form of support.

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Spencer opens with a string of expletives so dense it demonetized the video version on contact. Kevin, meanwhile, had to leave his own house and drive to a third location just to record an episode about cartoons. Anyway: FLCL, episodes one and two.

The setup, as Spencer explains it to a bewildered Kevin: a 12-year-old kid named Naota gets run over by a pink-haired woman on a Vespa. Her name's Haruko. She gives him CPR, whacks him with a guitar, and then just sort of moves into his house. Later a robot bursts out of his head. Then a second robot also bursts out of his head. Spencer reads all of this as being about puberty, Naota's older brother being gone, and Mamimi, the girl who prays to a video game god while doing little fire rituals with lighters taped to her face. Kevin's contribution is that it all felt like a dream, which Spencer declares the correct take.

Elsewhere: Spencer's latest Magic loss (great deck, politically knifed out of the game almost immediately), a bit on "Classroom of the Elite" and its protagonist who is apparently just the smartest student alive and fixes everything quietly forever, and a listener question about CPTSD and protective anger. Spencer gets unexpectedly real on that last one before concluding that, no, he mostly just accepts injustice rather than getting angry about it.

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Spencer kicks things off with a rousing game of "What Makes the Sound?" (a cow makes a moo, in case you were on the edge of your seat). From there, we meander gloriously through soda reviews. Kevin tries Dirty Mountain Dew and hates it, Spencer demolishes an entire can of Cuban Iron Beer soda like a man who has found religion, and somewhere in between, Spencer confesses to eating 900 calories of bread because Whole Foods lied to him about having strawberry pretzel cream pie.

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In this episode we manage to accomplish absolutely nothing of substance with remarkable efficiency. Spencer digs into his mysterious origin story as "The Spleen," a once-promising radio personality who got "cited" (not commended) back down to the evening drive slot. Along the way, we continue the debate on the legitimate athletic performance benefits of hummus, Kevin recounts being handed a fluorescent green cantaloupe slushie at a Vegas convention when he clearly asked for a Coke (he just took it and walked away), and Spencer gets judged for shopping at Walmart, where he heroically tracked down the elusive "Dirty Mountain Dew" by following a suspicious old woman's suspicious bottle inspection behavior.

Spencer also delivers an impassioned monologue about learning to code in Godot, where he has successfully produced hexagons that are in the wrong place, and is absolutely thrilled about it. We then pivot to a surprisingly thoughtful discussion about AI as a "fascist artifact," the strange permanence of internet content, and why neither of them can accept a compliment without immediately becoming suspicious of the person giving it. Somewhere in there we also vow to retroactively fix their September 11th episode by literally editing ourselves traveling back in time into it, which they probably won't do.

Emails are read, a mystery Taco Bell sign remains unaccounted for, and Spencer wraps things up by abruptly leaving the Zoom call.

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We return from what may or may not have been a long break. Honestly, we recorded some episodes out of order, so nobody really knows where we are in the timeline anymore. Before figuring out our own lore, we have some bad news: The Spleen is in the hospital after crashing an Uber at three times the speed limit. His prognosis remains unclear, though he was reportedly administered 30 cc's of Funyuns.

From there, we meander through Spencer getting bitten by a large dog whose elderly owner was being dragged down a hiking trail like an upturned Koopa shell, a coworker who died and was eulogized via workplace intercom sandwiched between parking reminders and a car show announcement, and an airport encounter with a man who was absolutely convinced that eating large quantities of homemade hummus was directly improving his tennis game. Kevin then arrives at his Las Vegas hotel to discover Mr. Beast staring at him outside his window, and somehow this is the least weird part of the episode.

We debate whether their podcast intro saying "white lives" is giving undue prominence to white lives, and discuss the chaotic teenage internet figure known as "Clavicular," who has been bone-smashing, meth-smoking, and tying backpacks to his genitals in pursuit of physical perfection. Spencer also reveals he has relapsed into smoking weed, while learning game development in Godot partly to spite his father, and has committed to invoking "Michael Jordan Flu Game" as a life philosophy. Listener emails round things out, including a fan whose wife assumed Spencer was "an educated black man."

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In this episode, Spencer and Kevin finally record in the same room for the first time in what feels like eons, which immediately throws us both into an existential crisis about where to look and whether we're supposed to be making a podcast or something else entirely. We're in an apartment that calls itself "luxury" with the same energy a gas station hot dog calls itself "gourmet," complete with an extensive list of fines in all-caps and bizarrely secretive key-hiding instructions.

To celebrate our physical reunion, we attempt a power hour featuring an alarming quantity of novelty Peeps flavors and five hot sauces including an Italian wolf-themed one that becomes our favorite by sheer force of garlic and vinegar. We eat while we're trying to talk about geopolitics, resulting in a chaotic blur of snack takes, Middle East tensions, and Spencer discovering mid-episode that he is, in fact, allergic to pecans. We also cover Spencer's grandmother keeping ham inside her boot. You probably don't want to miss that.

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The Spleen welcomes the brilliant Kate Freund to his Oubliette, and she's here to talk about Pretty Lethal, her action film about ballerinas who have to fight their way out of a very bad situation without the help of any dads whatsoever. Before getting into the cinematic deep cuts, the gang covers the important stuff: Kate's obsession with plant-based buffalo wings, the surprisingly rich cultural history connecting Roger Corman's grindhouse empire to the founding of IHOP, and the existential crisis Kate had after watching Taken and realizing her father's skill set was more "destroy a car dealer with paperwork" than "Liam Neeson."

Kate walks us through the absolutely heroic 15-year journey of getting Pretty Lethal made: from a 2011 draft involving a trapdoor to being told by an executive to just change all the women to a boys' baseball team. She didn't. The film, now top two in the US on Amazon, features five ballerinas, razor blades on pointe shoes, Uma Thurman doing knitting between takes, and a signed jar of Skippy that Kate will never, ever eat. Tune in, put on a tutu, and watch the damn movie.

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