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Binchtopia
Binchtopia

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Apocalypse Tonite Queen?

The girlies explore the concept of Doomsday, revisiting the countless times we’ve thought the world was coming to an end. From luxury arks and poisonous comets to God’s wrath and alien invasions, they consider the fact that the world has never ended…yet. Digressions include cozy season in the studio, being Twitter clean, and Eliza’s mom’s podcast debut.

This episode was produced by Julia Hava and Eliza McLamb and edited by Allison Hagan. Research assistance from Kylie Finnigan.

SOURCES

Halley’s Comet, Covid-19, and the history of ‘miracle’ anti-comet remedies

People Have Always Been Obsessed with the End of the World 

How it Ends: The Ancient Roots of Doomsday Prophecies and End of the World Beliefs 

ESOTERICA Volume IX (2007) 

Storming The Ark 

End of World in 2012? Maya "Doomsday" Calendar Explained 

2012: The End of the World as We Know It?  

Maya Expert: The 'End Of Times' Is Our Idea, Not The Ancients' 

Y2K bug

Apocalypse Then: When Y2K Didn’t Lead To The End Of Civilization 

The lessons of Y2K, 20 years later 

What Drives Doomsday Preppers 

Heaven’s Gate cult members found dead 

Doomsday Prepping Poised to Become $2.46 Billion Industry

In uncertain times, the prepper supply business is booming 

We Should All Be Preppers

Is There a Future in the Doomsday Economy?.

Here's a look inside a 15-story underground doomsday shelter for the 1% that has luxury homes, guns, and armored trucks

‘End of the world vibes’: why culture can’t stop thinking about apocalypse 

Psychology Reveals the Comforts of the Apocalypse 

Creation Story of the Maya 

Our Fascination With The End Of The World 

Our never ending obsession with the apocalypse 

Doomsday Psychology: The Appeal of Armageddon 

The Resiliency of Apocalyptic Belief 

The Christmas the Aliens Didn’t Come  

Survivalists and Preppers 

Comet Hale-Bopp: Facts about the bright and tragic comet 

Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake

Apocalypse Tonite Queen? Apocalypse Tonite Queen?

Comments

I met Eliza’s mom in the women’s Cat’s Cradle bathroom at Eliza’s Carrboro show this year and she was so lovely. I complimented her look (incredible green jumpsuit, even more incredible hair with long locks and bangs) and she said we had a similar vibe—big compliment, huge, she is a beautiful woman. When I asked how she knew Eliza, she paused then laughingly said, “um I’m her mom!” I told her it was an honor to meet her, I said, “I want to be friends with your daughter” and she immediately responded, “same.” She asked how I knew Eliza and I said, “well I know her music but I love Binchtopia! I’ve been listening for years.” She paused and I saw the look of hesitation cross her face, then she quickly dismissed herself and left. So when she basically said “LET ME CLEAR SOME SHIT UP….”know that she felt that from her chest. Binchies unite for Eliza’s mom!!!

Marissa

Thames pronounced ‘Tems’ 💖

Jasmine Forrest

my parents used to be friends with this guy who sold/rented out generators and for Y2K he rented some out to a literal children’s hospital because they were worried all their computers and equipment were just going to shut down at midnight and they would need a backup power source & so they were being proactive so he jacked up the prices a bit & then after it didn’t happen they were like hey we are a children’s hospital any chance we can get some of that money back since we just did not use them and he said no!!!!! that guy and his wife were my parents like BEST friends too and after that my parents were like wowwww that was shitty and kind of stopped talking to them lol

Meredith Floyd

this is what i was thinking of the whole time lmaoooo especially with the “oh we did the math wrong it’s actually happening later”

Meredith Floyd

Puffy coats and tall boots will keep yall warm 🧡

Rachel

I hope the billionaires are building bunkers because they are afraid of a class war and not something they know that we don’t

Maija Petterson

when I lived in Venezuela, you could sometimes "feel" the vibe that there was going to be some political turmoil, like a coup or suspension of constitutional guarantees or a general strike, so people would do "compras nerviosas" (nervous shopping) to stock up on food in case we had to stay home due to curfews bc of political strife etc. I lived through the original coup done by Hugo Chavez (I was just 7) in 92, currency collapse in 94, strikes/violence/deposement of the president in 2002, political violence in 2004. yeah... Latin American (who grew up in LatAm) binchies stand up 🙌 I was definitely buying dry food, water gallons, water purification tablets, a solar/movement powered radio & charger, masks with filters and TP as soon as I started hearing about COVID. I worried that the workers at water plants and electrical workers would get sick and we'd have no electricity or clean water!!

Vanessa Carolina Marcano-Kelly

Omg wait has anyone seen the new movie Y2K

Leccer

I have a long Patagonia puffer and it keeps me so warm!!

katrina!

Yeah I was gonna say, the Rapture was made up like 200 years ago!

Allie

okay i’ve been feeling similarly, currently i’m living in rome and two days after the election i was (drunkenly) looking out over the forum at night and kept thinking how many people have stood in this space and felt like the world was ending, and it was very grounding, also if there are any other binchies in rome… let’s meet up!!

Nina

I remember thinking in 2012- I buy a calendar every year that ends on Dec 31st and I don’t think the world is going to end on Jan 1st every time. Some calendars just have an eventual end??

Sarah

I had no idea until earlier this year that the whole rapture thing was just tacked on to Revelations by evangelicals because of one man's interpretation of it, all just for funsies! Like what the fuck!? I remember talking about it to kids on my school bus because my autistic ass took it literally (and because the church actively stamps out any critical thinking skills) and wanted them to know just in case. And I'm pretty sure that's why this one nice girl stopped talking to me as much. RIP Brittany, sorry I was weird.

The Immaculate Witch Kaitlin Reckord

In no way a Londoner, I'm Canadian, you better believe that I was taking backand correcting knowing full well they couldn't hear me lol

The Immaculate Witch Kaitlin Reckord

My mom sliced the top of her finger off when she was cutting box tops while I was at vacation bible school 🩵

Kristen Gload

did any other Londoners scream at the pronunciation of Thames lol I learnt in school that it’s a hard “T” sound rather than the soft “Th” sound as one of our old kings (James I maybe?) had a speech issue which meant he couldn’t do the “Th” sound, so everyone switched to a hard T to placate him, and it stuck

Ellie Fox

that's so real that people are so excited for some kind of novel doomsday apocalypse and they love stocking up on guns and powdered mashed potatoes, but they won't actually just put on a damn mask for covid 🫠

Lily Ana Verna

I got it in Livermore lol

avvsies

So here’s my take: while I know humans are tempted towards thinking it’s always the apocalypse, it actually is nearing the apocalypse for the actual earth itself. We have until 2029 to reverse the climate crisis and America just elected Donald trump who thinks it’s a hoax and who is already making/already made deals with oil billionaires to destroy environmental regulations to get them more money. So I think this thing of oh people are being alarmist is actually this sort of soothing urge we have to calm ourselves down and continue to numb and pacify ourselves out of reality. Will the apocalypse happen because of cultural shifts and anti human rights laws? No. But does the Earth have literally 5 years until it is irreversibly damaged, global temperatures are set to rise by around 38 degrees (F) by 2100, and most animals will go nearly if not fully extinct if we continue on the track we’re on? Yes. The earth will become incompatible with life for many animals, plants and ecosystems. We have to comfort ourselves with organizing. We have to soothe ourselves by taking action.

mozillafirerox

I've been finding my new ~worst tweet of the week~ on threads 😭 Or I'll see a very wholesome but very "r/thathappened" type thread with the MOST EVIL replies possible

Lily Ana Verna

Not my listening getting interrupted by an tsunami warning alert 😔

Sallie

Binchtopia manifested the Humboldt earthquake? They’re too powerful

Rachel Glover

Me listening to this episode peacefully then getting a tsunami warning in sf. Is this the big one or did I just happen to be listening about doomsday as I got pranked with my biggest fear?

Bella Maddy and Mikayla

people telling me that 2012 was the end of the world is genuinely the root of my anxiety issues

Ellie Beringer

For winter coats Patagonia is an amazing organization that donates the proceeds and you get lifetime repairs as well

Ava

A cut the tip of my finger off with a mandolin on Halloween. Everyone thought the blood was fake and I was being a little Halloween prankstress. 3 years later and my fingerprint is fucked up now. Also when people ask me why I wasn’t using the safety… it’s for babies DONT VICTIM BLAME ME

Callie Sokoloski

My cat son (pictured) had a UTI earlier this year and it was awful for all of us ❤️ Hoping Harley feels better soon. The emergency vet did not tell me I had to refrigerate his antibiotics BTW so I had to pay for a second vial/accidentally delayed his treatment so make sure you pay close attention to the instructions!

Hannah

i'm only a few minutes into the ep, but if anyone wants to learn more about the history of rapture ideology, have the real meaning of Revalations unobscured & dig into the real-world ramifications of the misinterpretation of it read Bart Ehrman's Armageddon! he's a world renowned new testament scholar who moved from conservative, evangelical Christianity into Agnosticism over like 30 years and I really think his journey allows him to express both compassion & understanding to those who are/have been entrenched in potentially harmful Christian ideology!

amber walls

Yes! Crowdstrike’s faulty software update was so disruptive causing BSOD all over the place

Ru

omg my parents went through a war prepper phase when russia invaded ukraine but they kinda gave up halfway through so now we have a cement bunker/basement in the backyard with the shittiest wooden door you’ve ever seen in your entire life (used exclusively to store pickles)

Julia Domagalska

THANK GODDD for this ep im so ill and I needed the binch IV

betty

All those flights that were cancelled this summer because of a global IT outage (?) was y2k vibes

kai

All I can think about is the Parks and Rec episode where they all wait in the park with the cult lmaoooo

CalamariAnderson

“maybe Jesus has a refractory period” ASGDHFJFJFDH

Sophia

also re: cold showers, i’ve been having the exact same problem and my mom told me I need to have my landlord flush the hard water from the water heater. apparently they’re supposed to do it every year bc hard water is really bad for water heaters and causes them not to heat as well but landlords suck and I doubt yours (or mine) is staying on schedule with that kind of thing

abby elsethagen

binchies! my dad personally worked in an IT department at the time of Y2K and he didn’t give me a ton of details when I asked (he isn’t really a conspiracy theorist so I think he just didn’t really believe it was that big of a deal) but he was required to go into work that night “just in case” so he basically spent that whole night in an office building doing basically nothing while my pregnant mom was home alone

abby elsethagen

The Thames is pronounced kinda like 'tems' ! From a London binchie xx

Morgan Harries

never thought as a maya archaeologist i would hear long count explained on the pod but honestly close enough love yall

kate burns

aw eliza tell your mom i lost half of my finger recently in a surfing accident and can also commit crime if she ever wants to bond over coffee and a robbery 🫶🏼

haley

me in the luxury ark: “oh my god its so preppy in here”

liv

One of the key principles of not crazy prepping is to prep for Tuesday, not for doomsday. The thing a lot of these gun and food bucket preppers get wrong is that you're much more likely to be in a natural disaster or lose your job than you are to be facing off the US government. Some basic prepper things that everyone can and should take is buying some extra canned food whenever they go to the store and CYCLE IT OUT so it doesn't go bad, and make sure to only buy food you want to eat; have a plan for water purification and storage, which can be as casual as having a backpacking water filter and tabs around; and managing to build up a financial cushion no matter how small, which is especially important now that we're facing down likely economic volatility as a result of the Trump admin. Fundamentally the most important tenant of prepperism is building community - knowing your neighbors, knowing what capacity you have and what you need to build, and having a spatial grasp of where you are. Gun nut preppers HATE community and that's why they always freak out when shit minorly hits the fan.

lizzy

men are still named camille in france 😂 also its pronounced cam-ee

Francesca Schneider

No joke, I just sliced the side of my pinky off with a madoline. Truthfully, more humiliating than cutting a thumb. Mind you, I had listened to the pod only a few hours ago and was like damn, sucks that happened to Eliza's mom.

H Possibly

I thought the 2012 apocalypse was going to be like the movie G-Force about the guinea pigs that stop all machines from coming alive and taking over the world

Emily mckeithen

hi! they know about what’s on the tails because when certain elements burn, they give off different “colors” (they all absorb or emit light at different ranges) which are measured by wave length! it’s called spectroscopy

Al

ok but the way Eliza’s mom’s “love youuuu” sounded just like Eliza at the end of every episode 😭

Abbey W

Alt episode title: it’s so preppy in here

Bel Kelly-Russo

This.

Jordan Jones

Growing up in Utah was a constant state of earthquake doomsday prep conditioning

Jacey B

Need Eliza’s mom bonus episode ASAP

Jacey B

Mandolines scare the shit out of me

Jacey B

I was convinced all was over in December 2012 I cried for days and stayed home from school on the day the world was supposed to end

Meg K

i’ve never listened to a podcast that talks about mormons so much lmao

car

get a carhartt jacket. They’re sooooooooo warm. I work in ag field research in NC and now bring it over my patagonia.

Eliza

My friend cut their fingertip off w a mando to the BONE and it did grow back!!!

Kelly Gilbert

Also the reason nothing happened with Y2K was exactly because they spent so much money and had so many ppl working on it, but it’s interesting too there ended up being a white supremacist aspect to it as well?? Of course, there always is when doomsday is involved

Junny

Vice has a show called Dark Side of the 90s and there’s an episode on Y2K, highly recommend watching that for a better understanding of why it was so serious! I only watched it like yesterday, I didn’t realise how complicated it actually was there was apparently 52 million lines of code that needed to be amended

Junny

re y2k: there’s a super interesting episode of the podcast Flash Forward that offers an interesting perspective on what might have happened if the y2k bug hadn’t been identified/fixed ahead of time. There’s a common perception that Y2K never would have been a big deal because nothing really happened, but this is because the problem was identified and fixed by software engineers ahead of time! So, things like the government creating a special Y2K task force or whatever may seem silly in hindsight but were likely doing important preventative work

Holly Acker

My mom also cut the tip of her finger off with a mandolin a couple weeks ago

Emily Love

Have yall seen the vid of the bunker with the whole underground like scenery bro

Leo flood

RE: how did they find toxic gas in the tail of Halley's comet? It's so far away?? ANSWER: spectroscopy! Think the album cover of Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. From the Canadian Space Agency: "Colour and light carry information. Studying the way that different wavelengths of light interact with different types of matter can reveal many of its characteristics, including temperature, composition, and motion." https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronomy/basics/what-is-spectroscopy.asp SOURCE: my partner, who is doing a MSc in physics!

Anne Margaret

Omg my friends middle name is Halle Bopp 😂

Senda

Logically I know I would never want to be in any kind of disaster/an very grateful that I haven't been, so tell me why the one time I was in an earthquake and it was really tiny I was kind of disappointed? Wouldn't expect to relate to preppers on much, but it was kind of a let down and I don't understand WHY

Ashley Viljoen

eliza, i’m sure you’ve considered this, but have you ever tried pretty litter? the litter changes colors if there are any issues or irregularities in your cat’s urine, and if there is any cause for concern for your cat’s health. it may save you an expensive vet bill or two.

Kat Cupp

Recommending a poetry collection by Franny Choi called “the world keeps ending and the world goes on.” I heard Franny read the title poem at AWP a few years ago and it was really nice. Love that book

Leo flood

i can second this (i’m in minneapolis)

Isabella

Omg I was hoping we would have some Mormon tie ins since those hoes LOVE prepping! If there are any binchies in utah, let’s have a ki 🫶🏼🫶🏼🫶🏼

Hannah Mitchell

i just want to say that i started running recently (a mile a day OUTSIDE bc i don’t have a gym membership) and i’ve discovered that podcasts work best to distract me from overthinking my breathing which makes running harder. today was my easiest run yet bc of the pod🛐

izzy

When I read the description for this ep I thought ur mum was launching her own pod and i would listen tbh !

Emily

Eliza ur mum is so iconic

Emily

Julia when the water changes temperature thats someone else in ur building flushing the toilet

dani

eliza’s mom i cut the tip of my thumb off with a mandoline 4 years ago and i have part of my thumbprint back finally!!

Elliot

I TOOK MY SLEEP MEDS AND WAS ABOUT TO CONTINUE RELISTENING OLD EPS thank you queens, i feel like you heard my anguished annoyance over staying up already too late.

HM

unfortunately the best coat i’ve ever owned IS an aritzia superpuff but in the medium length that covers your butt (i’m in toronto)

Ally Chozik

tis the season in NYC because i’m reporting my landlord to 311 for not having the heat on while i listen to this 🙃

Leslie

From a lifelong Chicago-n lands end and l.l. Bean for your warm af coats. They’re expensive but last forever and are so worth it

Hannah

Perfect timing

Josh F

love u so very much queens

bug

sigh of relief THANK YOU

johanna

On the way to the airport as we speak thank you binchies

Sophie

big bet

Skyrim

Thank godess

Bridget Bullard

Consuming the weekly ration immediately this time

Rachel Burkman

I needed this so bad

Bridget Bullard

YAY

mazie

YASSSS

Kyra!

Omg first hey girlies

Baby gorgeous


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