Greetings all

We have some more updates for you today, along with a special surprise at the end. You’ll definitely want to read this one.

Reminders

First, a quick reminder about sending us your photos/videos/album links, and any lyrics you may have written for the Open Mic Night. We’ve only heard from a handful of people, and we’d love to be able to share all of those with the whole community. Check out our previous wrap up post for full details.

Videos

Video editing is taking longer than we’d hoped, but we promise we’ll get them to you. We have over 300GB of footage, and can only work on it sporadically as real life allows. However, we did manage to get the first video done for you. If you missed Rand’s Q&A, RAWA’s hello, or just want to hear the proper way to eat watermelon again, have we got a video for you:

We’ll let you know when the rest of the videos have been uploaded!

Mysterium 2020

We’ve been doing a lot of research into various cities, and we have a meeting scheduled very soon to decide the location and con-chair(s) for Mysterium 2020. Again, stay tuned and we’ll let you know once we know.

Special Surprise

You all know that we had some awesome special guests at Mysterium this year. What you may not know is that there were several other VIPs who wanted to come, but couldn’t make it work for one reason or another. One of those people is Geneviève Lord, who was the Producer on Myst IV.

We were all bummed when she couldn’t make it, but she wanted to help out all the same. So, she got in touch with several of the concept artists who worked on Myst IV and asked them if they had any concept art kicking around that they’d be willing to share. Sure enough, she was able to get artwork from Andrzej Tutaj, Meinert Hansen, and Stephane Turgeon. With Ubisoft’s blessing, we’re able to share that artwork with the entire Myst community!

The plan was to make use of some of it for Mysterium 2019, but we just ran out of time. Instead, we’re releasing it to you in a zip file. All of this artwork is copyright 2004 – Ubisoft Entertainment/the original artist. We, Mysterium and the Falling Man Group, have no claim to it. Please be sure to read the included license file.

And now, without further delay, here is the link to download the Myst IV concept art: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zQubVGA-PtsSo-esjkjVH2bI3k-D9lad/view?usp=sharing

We’d like to thank the artists, and especially Geneviève, for helping to make this happen!

That’s all we have for now,

-Taniith
Mysterium 2019 Chair

Greetings All

Well, it’s been 2 weeks since Mysterium, and those of us who helped run it are finally getting back into the swing of normal life.

As far as we know, this was the biggest Mysterium in history! Including staff and special guests we had roughly 230 attendees in total, and there’s no way to know just how many family members and locals came to Cyan on Saturday. We’re all extremely happy with how this year turned out, and we hope everyone had a great time.

Survey

Before we call this year done, we have a few things to wrap up. First, as usual, we’ve put together a survey to get a feel for your experience at Mysterium this year. It’s not too long (and pretty much all of the questions are optional), so please fill it out when you have a few minutes so we can figure out how to make Mysterium better in the future. You can take the survey by clicking here.

If you weren’t able to come to Mysterium, we encourage you to take the survey, too! It has a whole section about future Mysteria, and your responses will also help us figure out which parts of the country we should go to next.

Coloring Books

The coloring books we made this year were a huge hit, and we’ve had many people ask if they can order them for delivery. We’re very happy to announce that the books are available through a print-on-demand service for $10! This is the same service we used to print the originals, so you’ll get the same high quality.

You can order coloring books here.

Open Mic Submissions

If you wrote lyrics or poetry or anything else for Mysterium’s Open Mic Night, and would like to share with the community, we want to post them in a public Google Drive folder. Several of you have already emailed us, but if you have something to submit please send it to committee@mysterium.net.

Photo Submissions

We’ve had many requests for a central place where you can upload your photos and videos. Unfortunately, a lot of the older photo-sharing sites have shut down or require payment to use, which is why we haven’t done this for the past few years. For this year, we’re trying three different options.

First, we’ve setup a shared Google Photos album. This does require you to have a Google account, but beyond that it should make it very easy for you to add photos and for other folks to find them. If you’d like to add photos to the album, follow this link.

We’ve also setup a Dropbox folder where you can upload photos, if you’d prefer to just send them to us directly. Be aware that we may not be able to credit you on your photos if you submit them this way. You can upload your photos by following this link.

Finally, if you’ve already uploaded your photos elsewhere, please send us a link to the album (and remember to make sure it’s set as public). We’ll be sure to include a list of external albums on our website.

Mysterium 2020

As announced at the end of Mysterium this year, we don’t yet have a location or con-chair selected for Mysterium 2020. We have a shortlist and expect to have it nailed down by mid-to-late September.

Also, be aware that we aren’t going to lock in the dates for next year’s convention until sometime in the fall. We can guarantee that Mysterium 2020 will still be held sometime in late July/early August, just not the specific weekend. We recognize that having a fixed weekend is useful for attendees to plan their vacations, and we intend to have the dates chosen early enough that it shouldn’t be a problem.

For each of the past few years, we’ve run into situations where cities that we chose were unexpectedly filled by some other event. This drastically reduces our options for hotels and makes it much harder to find a hotel in a convenient location for a reasonable price. Hotels always say, “if you could do the weekend before, we would have space/could give you a better rate”. For that reason, we’ve decided to be a little more flexible with our dates.

Stay tuned here and on our social media for more 2020 information.

We’ll try to get the 2019 video footage edited and uploaded over the next few weeks. Otherwise, that’s all we have for now. Thank you all for continuing to support Mysterium and Cyan. We look forward to reading your survey answers, and we hope to see you next year.

Until then,
-Taniith
Mysterium 2019 Chair

Hi Everyone

We’ve been receiving a lot of questions about on-site registration this year, and I want to address them all in one place to try and clear up some confusion.

Will there be badges available at the door?

The best answer we can give you is “probably”. We fully intend to sell on-site registration, but we expect to be very close to the capacity limit of our con-room.

We strongly recommend that only Spokane locals expect to purchase on-site badges. We discourage folks coming from a long distance away from coming in the hopes of getting a badge.

Can you tell me how many badges will be available at the door so I can gauge my chances?

Unfortunately, we cannot. As mentioned above, we expect to be near capacity already, given our pre-registration numbers. We won’t be able to tell how much space/how many seats we really have available until we see the space in person.

I pre-registered but can no longer attend. Can I transfer my registration to someone else?

No, we do not allow registration transfers.

I need a hotel room. Is there still space at the overflow hotel?

Both the main Mysterium hotel and the overflow hotel are completely booked solid. There is also another large event happening in Spokane that weekend, so most hotels in the area are similarly booked solid.

Believe me, we wish we could sell badges to anyone and everyone who wants to attend, but we can only fit so many people in the room. We’re sorry if this ruins anyone’s plans, but this is the situation at the present moment. We will post an update if anything changes.

-Taniith
Mysterium 2019 con-chair

Greetings all

Happy 4th of July to US-based fans! We have quite a bit of news for you today, including the release of this year’s schedule. Let’s get right to it:

Mysterium 2019 Schedule

At long last, we’re happy to release our weekend schedule. You can check it out here.

We have a packed weekend for you, including a visit to Cyan on Saturday. Over the next month, we’ll highlight a few of the more exciting events in additional blog posts. For the moment, though, we’d like to talk about how signatures from our special guests will work.

We have two blocks scheduled on Friday, as well as time while we’re at Cyan, for folks to get signatures from our guests. Of course, you are also welcome to chat with them throughout the weekend if they aren’t busy. Signatures are free, but we will not be providing photos or signature sheets for you. You are limited to having 3 items signed at any one visit, though you are welcome to get back in line. If you want to take a photo with one of the guests, you are welcome to take a quick selfie on your phone, provided it is out and ready to go. You may not ask other people to take a photo for you.

For signature slots at the hotel on Friday, we’ll be handing out numbers at the registration desk and calling small groups in according to those numbers. This will help us keep the crowds down, and also lets you do other things while you wait, rather than just waiting in line.

Hotel Update

As you probably know, our hotel (Ruby River) is booked solid. We have managed to secure a handful of rooms at a nearby overflow hotel. If you’d like to book one of those rooms, you can find out more info at our location page. Also, if you have a room at the overflow hotel and have mobility issues that would make it hard to get to and from the Ruby River hotel, please contact us through the methods listed on that page. We’ll try our best to help.

Next Guest – Kha’tie Postma

We have one last special guest to announce, and we’re very excited about it.

Kha’tie has been around the Myst community for a long time. In the early 2000s she was Ubisoft’s Community Manager for the Myst games. After Myst V and the Uru sequels launched, she moved to other studios including Cartoon Network, Gazillion, Disruptor Beam, and Stoic, and worked on titles including Stargate, Star Trek, Marvel, and Game of Thrones. Since the Myst 25th Kickstarter, she has been working with Cyan as a community, social media, and marketing management consultant. She has also been helping us to liaise with Cyan this year, as well as helping us get in touch with many of our special guests and moderating several of our panels. We’re happy to welcome Kha’tie back to Mysterium.

You can find out more about Kha’tie and our other special guests here.

Panel Topics and Other Submissions

We have quite a few panels on the schedule this year, and we know there are topics that you are dying to hear about. If you’d like to suggest some topics for our guests to discuss, we have a form here. We’ll forward any suggestions to our panel moderators.

We also have a new submission option that just opened up. A number of folks have asked if they can display their Myst and Cyan-related writing/fiction/artwork at Mysterium this year. Thanks to our awesome staff-member Annacat, we’re now taking submissions for just that! You don’t even have to be attending. You can find out all the details here. Submissions must be received by July 30th.

We are also still accepting Mysterium Memories up until the convention.

That’s all for today. Stay tuned for more news soon!

-Taniith
Mysterium 2019 Con Chair