David Thomas MooahahahAHAHA!

#ttrpg top tip: if you play any edition of D&D (or any game that uses a square grid and minis), A1 flipchart paper with 25mm grid lines is available from all your favourite online stationery suppliers, for around £5-10 per 40-sheet pad

it's a perfect size for a kitchen table game, and it suits most smaller minis. you can prep maps in advance for each session and/or build up a library of reusable standard scenes (tavern, forest clearing, marketplace, etc.)

#ttrpg top tip: if you play any edition of D&D (or any game that uses a square grid and minis), A1 flipchart paper with 25mm grid lines is available from all your favourite online stationery suppliers, for around £5-10 per 40-sheet pad

it's not even that it's an objectively bad idea, it's just that I feel like "preparing the UK" for various crises is the sort of thing I expect the government to do. it's pretty much top of the list of things I'm looking for.

"How did you get into tabletop role-playing games?" Nine or ten years old, a friend's older brother at school ran a Basic D&D game. I got handed a character sheet for a level 1 Magic-User(!). I had no idea what I was doing. Halfway through the session someone shouted "Cast Magic Missile!"

Got my first Basic Set box for 50p at a second hand sale a few weeks later, then Dad bought me the AD&D books the following year. Been more than forty years of dice-hurling, now.

just reminded myself of one of the silliest, most whimsical viral moments of the 2010s:

funny thing is, yachts just aren't very practical things to own. they're not a particularly fast way to get around, and using them for leisure sort of demands a lot of free time. the attraction is basically that they're very, very expensive, more so than almost any other very, very expensive thing.

everything about the existence of billionaires is gross, but this may be the grossest thing. something appallingly, unimaginably expensive, something that couldn't exist until something called a "billionaire" existed, and which is nonetheless too impractical even for billionaires to really use them.

funny thing is, yachts just aren't very practical things to own. they're not a particularly fast way to get around, and using them for leisure sort of demands a lot of free time. the attraction is basically that they're very, very expensive, more so than almost any other very, very expensive thing.

As Shabana Mahmood waves the vague spectre of immigrants' "relatives" swamping public services, your perennial reminder that in all studies at all times across the years immigrants have always been net contributors to the public purse while nationals are net beneficiaries.

And this leaves out the great extent to which public services - especially health and care provision - are *staffed by immigrants*. So even without those figures, we need migration for these things.

As Shabana Mahmood waves the vague spectre of immigrants' "relatives" swamping public services, your perennial reminder that in all studies at all times across the years immigrants have always been net contributors to the public purse while nationals are net beneficiaries.

There are a bunch of reasons for this, including that we limit access to services for recent migrants, but the main one is that most immigrants are healthy young adults who immediately join the workforce, and therefore consume neither education/childcare nor welfare provision until retirement.

As Shabana Mahmood waves the vague spectre of immigrants' "relatives" swamping public services, your perennial reminder that in all studies at all times across the years immigrants have always been net contributors to the public purse while nationals are net beneficiaries.

the official Comedy Oversized D20 from this year's Dungeons and Disorderly!

Actual footage! Comedy Outsized D20 visible in front of @alasdairstuart.com, right.

the official Comedy Oversized D20 from this year's Dungeons and Disorderly!