• Magic: the Gathering sealed deck tournament. $18 entry fee buys 2 packs each of Dark Ascension and Innistrad, land provided. Should begin by 10:30-11:00am. Minimum eight players needed to make a sanctioned event. Prizes provided. Run by Dark Tower Gaming.
• Magic: the Gathering standard constructed deck tournament. $5 entry fee. Uses the standard constructed environment: Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged, New Phyrexia, M12, Innistrad, and Dark Ascension. Tournament starts at 4:00pm. Prizes provided. Run by Dark Tower Gaming.

Green Mountain Gamers is excited to continue the trend of hosting more organized gaming, first by the Book Garden in Barre, and now Dark Tower in Lyndonville.

Gamers doing what they do best at Winter Weirdness.

Those who remembered last year’s Winter Weirdness game day might have had lousy travel weather on their mind in the run-up to the 2012 event. In spite of weather advisories the night before, the driving was fair and Green Mountain Gamers had their biggest turn-out ever, with over fifty people flocking to the Church of the Good Shepherd in Barre, Vermont for a day of tabletop gaming.

Rick of The Book Garden presents Steve with his gift certificate prize.

Rick Powell of the Book Garden arrived mid-morning to vend games and host some afternoon Magic: the Gathering. Eight players coalesced for a draft tournament that stretched into the evening. Rick also kindly donated a $50 gift certificate to the Book Garden as a door prize for Winter Weirdness. Everyone who donated to Green Mountain Gamers was eligible to enter for the door prize, which Steve Petruzzi won in the drawing.

And speaking of donations, Winter Weirdness attendees were so generous this year in giving to support the event that Green Mountain Gamers is able to make a $200 donation to the Church of the Good Shepherd. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the effort!

It was non-stop board and card games throughout the day. You can glimpse some of the games played in the pictures below. To give you an idea of the sheer range of kinds of games played, some of those played that day include A Game of Thrones, Ora et Labora and Secret Tijuana Deathmatch.

It all made for an excellent day of gaming in central Vermont. From Barre, the Green Mountain Gamers move on to Lyndonville for Spring Meltdown on April 21st. Hope to see you there!

There are a few set-up steps we’ll walk through to get the bookmarklet set for use. Go behind the jump for the whole process.

Navigate to Your Profile Page

First, log in and go to your profile page by clicking My Account in the toolbar at the top of the page, or on your avatar wherever you see it on the site.

Below your display name, user name and most recent activity update is a link reading “What about adding a bookmarklet in your browser bookmarks toolbar ?,” as seen in the picture to the right.

Using the Bookmarklet to Share Content

Now, whenever you want to share a link in your activity stream, you can do so with a couple clicks. While looking at the page, picture or whatever you want to share, click on the bookmarklet in your toolbar, menu or wherever you put it.

A small window will pop up looking rather like the one to the right. You can edit the text to your heart’s content. Certainly replace “[your content here]” with some interesting commentary of your own, but you can also shorten the text in the link, which is by default the title of the page to which you’re linking, add some mark-up to make it pretty and everything else you can do in an activity update.

When you’re done, click Post Update and the link will appear in your activity stream as an update. Done!

This walkthrough will live in the How to Use This Site Section under Sharing Content, so check there for the latest version.

Andrew supervises the rail barons at Winter Weirdness 2011; the crew of Battlestar Galactica schemes in the background.

Even with less than two months to go, it feels a bit odd to talk about something that happens in 2012. That year has always had the ring of the future to it, and now it’s just around the corner.

Go boldly with us into that future as we return to the undercroft of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Barre for Winter Weirdness 2012. The forum thread is already hopping with folks suggesting games to play, like A Game of Thrones and King of Tokyo.

Additionally, the Book Garden will run a Green Mountain Game Day’s first ever Magic: the Gathering tournament. Capacity runs to 16 participants with a $15-20 buy-in per player.

The Book Garden has also kindly donated a gift certificate to be awarded at Winter Weirdness. Everyone who makes a donation at the door — half of the total proceeds of which goes to the Church of the Good Shepherd’s food shelf — may enter in the drawing. The Book Garden is conveniently located in downtown Montpelier on State Street for central Vermont’s gaming supply needs.

Winter Weirdness 2012 happens January 14th from 10:00am to 10:00pm at the Church of the Good Shepherd on Washington Street in Barre, Vermont. Visit the Winter Weirdness page for directions, updates and more.

Elsewhere, The Escapist has updated the Adventurer’s Atlas of its Young Person’s Adventure League, which is “The Adventurer’s Atlas is your guide to the best role-playing adventure games for young people, a sort of road map to other worlds where you are free to explore as another character, a tour guide of places to go and people to be.”

If you have children, are you doing anything particular to teach them the joys of the tabletop hobby?

The Vermont area gaming community stepped up to contribute to flood relief as well. Matt Golec organized a charity Geeklist auction — ending tonight! — to generate money for the Red Cross. Triple Play of West Lebanon hosts a Flood Benefit Game Day on September 10th, collecting donations and holding a raffle to also go to the Red Cross.

Inspired by their example, Green Mountain Gamers is holding a fundraising drive. We will match dollar for dollar donations sent via Paypal to greenmtngamers@gmail.com, up to $100, making a potential total donation of $200, to the Vermont Food Bank, which contributes to post-Irene disaster relief needs.

The drive runs for seven days, from September 7th to the 14th. If you haven’t already made a contribution to Vermont flood relief, this is your chance to do so. And please help spread the word; the more people who contribute the better.

Spread the word about this to all your game-playing friends, wherever they may be!

Find a wordier version of this post here.

Redeemable for games!

Hot in our hands for Fall-loha is a pair — that’s right, count ‘em, two — of gift certificates generously donated to the day’s festivities by Quarterstaff Games of Burlington. Two lucky game day-goers will each receive a $25 certificate to spend at northern Vermont’s long-standing purveyors of tabletop-related delights.

To put yourself in the running to win one of these gift certificates, you need only do two things:

1. Attend Fall-loha. (But you were going to do that anyway.)
2. Make a donation at the door, helping Green Mountain Gamers cover the expenses of renting the hall and all that fun stuff. While doing so, write out your name and contact information on the provided slip of paper.

It’s that easy!

Later in the day, probably around 4:00 or 5:00ish, we’ll hold a drawing right there for the lucky winners to receive their prizes.

Thanks again to Quarterstaff for kindly donating the gift certificates to make this door prize drawing possible. Open seven days a week, Quarterstaff may be found at 152 Church Street in the heart of Burlington.

Blog posts appear in the stream much like any user’s status update, but including a header with the post title, the blog name and the initial few dozen words of content below.

Find Your Blog Feed

Most, if not all, blogs have a feed, a way for other websites and applications to read and display posts. This is typically called an RSS or Atom feed. It is not your blog’s main URL. If you don’t know where the link to your blog’s feed is, you can usually find it by searching the front page for instances of the words “feed” or “subscribe.” When you find the link, copy the URL.

In WordPress blogs, for instance, the feed URL typically takes the form of http://www.yourblog.com/feed. BlogSpot/Blogger/Google Blogs are a little trickier. The URLs tend to look like http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

How to access the External Blogs control panel.

Navigate to the External Blogs Panel

To add your blog posts to your Green Mountain Gamers activity stream, you must first log into the site. At the top of the screen, go to the My Account menu, mouse down to the Settings item, then click on the External Blogs item. This takes you to the sub-tab of your account’s Settings panel.

Paste your feed in this field, then click Save Changes.

Add Your Blog’s Feed

There’s only one field on the External Blogs tab, called Enter Feed URL. Paste the feed URL in that field. Click Save Changes and you’re done!

Tips

• You may add one feed to your profile. If you have multiple feeds — primary blog, secondary blog, Twitter feed, etc — you’ll have to prioritize.
• Don’t panic if your feed’s posts don’t immediately appear in the activity stream. New blog posts are pulled when another member loads the page, so they’ll be visible when someone else visits, if not for you.
• This guide will live in the How to Use This Site section. Check there for any updates in the future.

Photo by James Kim.

The Green Mountain Gamers website will go down for routine maintenance at 10:00pm EST on Friday, July 8th. After 10:00, the site may come and go and appear to be only partially functional as elements are turned off and on. Smooth sailing assumed, it should be back up not much later.