Our patron rootbeercutie recommended I Am Not Starfire and since we had somehow not done a graphic novel in the 10 years of this podcast, Chris stepped up to tackle this Teen Titans spinoff. Today's episode features a whole lot of superhero tropes and parent/child strife; even good art and a lesbian protagonist who gets a happy ending couldn't save this one, though.

We haven’t done any self-help lately, so Paris braved Oprah's Book Club list to pull the recently published Secrets of Adulthood straight from its maw. Though it attempted to take her, she fought her way out to bring you this episode about the science of happiness and the pop cultural grift which swirls around it.

References & Resources:

• Dr. Robert Waldinger: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness
• The Good Life by Robert Waldinger, MD & Marc Shulz, PhD

• Dr. Laurie's Happiness Lab Podcast

• The Science of Well-Being: Dr. Laurie's Yale course, free for adults and a teen version

• Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness

• The Wiser Model

• University of New Hampshire - Positive Psychology
• The You You Are by Ricken Hale, PhD

Content Warnings: In addition to our usual barnyard language, today’s episode includes discussion or mention of capitalism and eating the rich.

One dark day in the TBC Patreon chat dungeons, our Patron Austin scrawled the following message to us:

"...[D]uring the 80s there was a guy literally named Dick Wulf (Not to be confused with law and order producer and writer Dick Wolf) who made a Christian version of D&D called Dragonraid. There's very little documentation online about what the game system was like but it did exist and from what I can gather there was some sort of mechanic involving casting spells by reciting bible verses. Cut to like 2020, some forty years later, some Christian company approaches Dick Wulf to buy the intellectual rights to his fantasy world so they can rebrand as LightRaider the new Christian fantasy RPG sensation! For the low low price of 57.99! And to build hype as they were creating the actual system, they created LightRaider Academy, a trilogy of YA Novels."

Based on this information, Chris could have read a LightRaider Academy novel, but, no - he had to spread the suffering around. So, he recruited his friends Phoebe and Kami to support Paris on an adventure into the world of DragonRaid. Our party gets to roll a single die and encounter terrifying dangers such as orcs, wolves, racist charicatures, and fat shaming! Don't even think about eating pie - literally.

In addition to being our GM, Chris also did all of the scoring for today's episode. Remember that you can hire him at Oselka Sound for all of your composition, sound design, editing, music teaching, and session work needs.

If you enjoyed our guests, you can find Phoebe on Instagram @phoebe.danskin and Kami on Twitch @maniacalpillow

In addition to our usual barnyard language, today’s episode includes discussion of Christianity, fatphobia, and anti-semitism.