I had a lot of free time when I started listening, and decided to use it binging everything. In chronological order. Because I was like that. Sometime around Nacre, as you do, I fell in love with the kind of storytelling they were doing. Sometime during Counter/Weight, I realised there were specific people whose characters I would just always love (Jack and Art). That helped with just going through the whole thing very fast, though the downside is that I remember the story overall but not always the specific beats. So, uh. I've ended up relistening to it (chronologically once more) slowly, so that I can actually remember what happened when? And after a year and a half-ish of that being my while-driving-listening, I have gotten to... the part of C/W where they switch into The Sprawl.

I've never been to Atlantic City, but even for me there's a lot of fun references going around about weird Americana in general. :) I am fairly certain they do reference the elephant hotel somehow, but I couldn't tell you when or how or if there is one in Bluff City. Nostalgia is definitely a big part of it, though, since Austin grew up near to Atlantic City anyway, and at one point spent like an hour of his Drawing Maps stream just giving everyone a virtual tour of it complete with references about his life. (The rest of that stream is extremely full of spoilers for Bluff City, but that bit alone was very cool.)

Yeah! The fandom's pretty good at making sure that it's hard to read spoilers without putting effort into it, at least, even if it also makes it hard to look up reactions if you're catching up. The discord's also nice 'cause the parts of it that are just about 'hey, go ahead and have spaces to talk about whatever else you like too' are just as active as the part about the show, which helps it feel like an actual community instead of just a place to be an obsessive fan.