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I just placed a nifty Amazon order. Found a cheap copy of Sid Sackson's A Gamut of Games, that sainted designer's seminal work -- there are several used copies for under $20 still there, if you'd like to go look yourself. I'm pleased coz the last time I looked there was one bozo selling it for $300 or something. Anyway, lots of grist for Volity, I bet, with leftover inspiration besides.

While shopping I found that cross-medium design guru Greg Costikyan has his own Amazon list on game design books. So I purchased A Theory of Fun and Rules of Play, based on that.

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I want to start increasing the frequency of my community game play, perhaps hosting a monthy or even biweekly game night myself. I have been talking about this for a long time but every time I start drafting an email I get stuck in the same spot. I don't like talking about it because it's socially tricky, so I haven't really sought advice. I'll do it now though while I'm hopped up & brave from the day's First Coffee.

My problem boils down to the fact that not everyone I like likes each other. A common enough situation, and easily manageable through crafty invitation-juggling when planning small events. With things like game nights, though, one usually casts a wide net, inviting every local friend who digs games. But if I did that, and everyone showed up (which I wouldn't expect, but if they did), igry situations would follow.

At the same time, though, I don't want to seem exclusionary. The most efficient, cold and calculating solution would probably involve simply not inviting everyone who is involved in a no-likey pairing, because everyone left over are still cool friends and I'd have fun in their company. But I'm not one for cold maneuvers like that!

I welcome social advice here... would inviting everyone and letting the invitees sort it out for themselves be the best route? That certainly seems to be the favored stance with other email-based community events. Or is that falling into one of the old Geek Social Fallacies, and something I should seek to break out of? Meh...

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Declared today a work-from-home day after the combination of a half-broken Red Line and a commencement-disrupted Harvard shuttle outbid my desire to get to my office (where I usually end up not actually interacting with anyone anyway). Called in, all cool.

Came home and learned via hauntmeister that the Red Line disruption was from a suicide attempt at Davis station.

Props to the T by quickly making a free shuttle available to cover the shut-down route, and making inbound subway service from Harvard free as well... I guess that's all they could do, and they could have been way stupider about it.

Anyway, the Red Line is probably gonna be klunky for the rest of today.