Category Archives: General

It’s Beginning to Looks A Lot Like Mysterium…

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Everywhere you go…

Mysterium is coming up quickly and there are a few important things we need to share with you.

Registration Cap

First, registration is capped at 250 people this year. We are approaching that number now, so if you intend to come but have not yet registered, now is the time! All of the information regarding registration can be found here. If you know you are no longer able to attend, please reach out to us so we can account for you and avoid turning any more people away than we need to.

Hotel Deadline

The deadline for the hotel is very soon. If you do not have a room booked by May 28th, you will not be able to get a room in our room block or at our special Mysterium rate. There may be other rooms in the hotel available, however we cannot offer nor guarantee any special pricing for those rooms. If there are any issues with availability of the room type you are looking for before the deadline, please reach out to Odo to see if any more rooms of that type are available.

Again, the deadline is May 28th. There are no exceptions to this deadline.

Swag Deadline

The swag deadline is June 3rd. While there will be a limited number of swag items available to purchase at the registration desk, it will be first come, first served basis.

If you’re interested in placing an order for items ahead of time with your registration, please do so before June 3rd.

Listening Aids Update

Due to lack of interest, we’ve decided to not rent the listening aid devices this year.

On-Site Activities 101

We put together a great page that talks about all the fun stuff that will be available for you to do on-site at Mysterium this year! Check out the full list on this page!

April Prompt Winner

The April Prompt (“You Fool!”) winner is redwoodroad, for their drawing of Achenar, Sirrus and Yeesha playing a prank on Gehn. Congratulations!

It’s Gonna Be May!

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Shorah Everyone!

Mysterium is only two months away (cue the screaming here) and we of the committee are excited to see all of you come June 30th! That being said, we have a couple of reminders for you!

Reminders

  • Book your hotel room before the closing date on May 28th. If you reserve your room after that date, the code for the rooms will no longer work and you’ll have to pay the full hotel price. Reservations for the rooms can be found here. Any further information about the hotel can be found on our location page of our website.
  • Our cut-off date for swag is June 3rd! Any orders not finalized by this date will be unavailable. There will be a limited number of swag items at the registration table available for purchase on a first come, first serve basis.
  • Online Registration ends on June 16th. While we will allow walk-in registration at the door for 50$, we ask that you register before the deadline so that we can get an accurate head count for Cyan.

Which brings us to our next point…

Assisted Listening

This year, for the first time, Mysterium will be renting and offering assistive listening technology. We will be using Williams Sound PPA 457 Personal Assistive Listening System, so if you require one of these, please contact the committee through the committee@mysterium.net email ASAP (by no later than June 1st) so we can compile a headcount for the use of these. During the convention, please check in at the registration desk to pick yours up, but bear in mind that we will be requiring either a deposit or a form of collateral from you.

May’s Creative Prompt

And lastly, our Prompt for May is: Spring. (Give us all the plays on words, all the puns you can think of. No holds barred pun challenge is a go!)

We’ll be coming back to you soon with more information on a schedule, our final headcount, and any other important information, so be on the lookout.

Until then,
m13, Co-Chair of Mysterium 2023

Open Mic Submissions

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Shorah Everyone

We have another quick update for you.

Open Mic Night

Last year we held our first Open Mic Night, an evolution of our Mysterium Showtunes event in 2018. It continues to be a popular, and fun, event, so we want to bring it to our virtual Mysterium. Instead of live performances, we’ll be taking submissions of your song parodies, poetry, skits, and anything else you can come up with. We’ll string them together and show them during the virtual Mysterium.

We hope a lot of you choose to participate, and we look forward to seeing your awesome creations. Remember, this is all about having fun. You don’t have to be the best singer or writer – just look at the goofballs on the Mysterium committee performing last year!

You can get all of the details about Open Mic Night submissions here.

Other Submissions

Don’t forget that we still have submissions open for events, activity book pages, and our Pass the Book Challenge. You can find all the details for those on our submissions page.

Registration Roll-Over

We said in our last blog post that we’d email anyone who already registered for Mysterium 2020. We promise we didn’t forget, and we expect those emails to go out in the next day or so. Keep an eye on your inbox!

Myst Documentary

Our friends over at the Myst Documentary have launched a new interactive website. Philip Shane, who is making the documentary, will once again be presenting at Mysterium this summer. Until then, though, we encourage you to check out the new site and sign up for their mailing list.

That’s all we have for you this week. Stay tuned for some exciting announcements next week, including registration, extra special guests, and more!

–The Mysterium Committee

(PS – Don’t forget to order a T-shirt and support some great organizations all at once!)

Mysterium Updates and Taking Action

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Hello everyone

It’s hard to write a blog post about a gaming convention right now. On the one hand, we want to get you information about the convention in a timely manner. On the other hand, we can’t ignore what is happening in the world around us, as people of color and others around the country – and the world – protest police brutality and a long history of systemic injustice. We want to make it very clear that everyone involved in planning Mysterium supports the Black Lives Matter protests, and that there will never be space for racism or bigotry within the Mysterium community.

We plan to put our money where our mouths are at the end of this post, but first we want to give you an update on the rescheduled Mysterium 2021 convention:

Mysterium 2021

For the first time ever, we’re giving you over 13 months to plan for Mysterium! The dates of the rescheduled Mysterium 2021 are July 16-18, at the same hotel (Westin Alexandria Old Town in Alexandria, VA) and same room rate ($100/night). See our updated Location page for more details.

Hotel Bookings

The hotel will be cancelling your 2020 booking in the next couple weeks, so you should not need to do anything. If this hasn’t occurred by July 1, we will contact the hotel and update you with plenty of time before the cancellation date. We will post the link to book 2021 hotel rooms at our rate after our virtual Mysterium 2020 convention is over.

Registration

If you have already purchased a registration for Mysterium 2020, you will have the option of rolling it over to 2021, or requesting a refund. If you choose to roll over your registration, you will not be responsible for any price increases between now and the event. We will contact you soon with more details, using the email address you provided when you registered. For those of you who have not yet purchased a ticket, we will open Mysterium 2021 registration later this year.

Mysterium 2020

We have several interesting events planned for our virtual Mysterium, and we want to remind you that you can submit your own virtual event ideas here.

Calling All Costumers

One event we’re excited about is what we’re calling the Pass The Book Challenge, based on the popular Pass The Brush Challenge videos that have been circulating recently. If you have any Myst, Obduction, or other Cyan related costumes, this is your time to shine! All you have to do is record a pair of videos of yourself before and after putting on the costume, and we’ll edit them together into a fun video to be played during Mysterium!

Don’t stress about this. It’s not about having the most complex or intricate costume, it’s about having fun and showing off your creativity.

You can read all the details here!

T-Shirt Updates and Profit Donations

We have made some minor updates to the dates on the T-Shirt logos, and we have opened a new web store where you can order them! You can get all the info about our shirts and store on our Shirts Page. If you already bought a shirt with your registration, we will be in touch with you over email soon to discuss your options.

Now, we said at the start of this post that we’d be putting our money where our mouths are, and it’s time to do just that. We will be donating $2 from every shirt sold through the end of August to Campaign Zero and to Gameheads.

  • Campaign Zero is focused on research about police violence, how different policies affect it, and pushing for legislation to enact those policies and to help stop the violence entirely.
  • Gameheads is an organization focused on helping to prepare low income youth and youth of color to enter and thrive in the technology and video game industries. It’s certainly a different choice from Campaign Zero, but it felt appropriate coming from a convention about a video game series.

The donations will be evenly split between the two organizations. We’d love to give even more money, but realistically we only make $8-10 per shirt sold (depending on how many we sell), and the money we get from shirt sales is a significant part of how we fund the convention. If you would like to make your own donations, here are some other organizations to look at:

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund

The Black Visions Collective

The ACLU

Color Of Change

You local bail fund (find it on this and other lists)

We will have more for you soon. Until then, we hope you all stay safe and healthy.

-The Mysterium Committee

Mysterium: Trap Book Edition

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Alright, this is going to be a long one. We have quite a bit of (good) news to share with you all!

Mysterium 2020 2021

We expect to have information about Mysterium 2021, hotel room cancellations, and registration refunds/roll-overs for you in the next week or so. Thank you for your continued patience, and please stay tuned.

Mysterium: Trap Book Edition

Our plans for an online Mysterium, as announced in our last blog post, are coming together. We are planning some exciting panels and assembling a roster of special guests. We’ll have more on that soon. In the meantime, hopefully this will answer some of your questions about the nature of the event.

Dates

We will be holding the event the same weekend that we would have been in the DC area (August 7-9). Since travel will no longer be an issue, we may extend into Sunday afternoon based on scheduling needs.

Event Submissions

If you submitted an event for Mysterium 2020, we will be contacting you to discuss the possibility of moving it online. If you wish to run an event, please see our Event submissions page for updated info regarding online event submissions. We’ve extended the deadline for submissions to June 30 in order to give you all more time to send your ideas. Unique to this year, we are providing the option to submit pre-recorded presentations to air during the convention if you are unable to present live.

Digital Activity Book

We are extending the deadline for activity book pages to June 30. Any submissions received by that date will be included in a digital version of the book, available for the online convention. We also plan to hold submitted pages and print them in a book for the in-person convention next year.

Technology

We plan to use a combination of Twitch and Zoom for presentations and communication. As always, Discord will also be available for text and audio conversations before and during the event.

Registration

We are currently working out the details of registration for the online event. We will have more information about this soon.

Swag

T-shirts

The existing t-shirt design will be used for Mysterium 2021, with altered dates. If you already registered for Mysterium 2020 and you ordered a t-shirt with your registration, we will contact you soon to give you the option to have your shirt shipped to you (you will need to pay associated shipping fees). Alternatively, we can simply hold on to your order, and you can collect your shirt in person next year, as usual.

We will also be opening up a store page soon to allow anyone to pre-order these shirts. Shirts will be printed this summer, and we will do our best to get them to you in time for our virtual convention (though we can’t make promises on that). We will even be allowing international fans to purchase shirts, as we hope our virtual convention will be able to reach a global audience. See our updated T-shirt page for details.

Pins/Activity Book

The 2020 pin designs will be rolled over into 2021. Distribution will be the same as in previous years: they will be included with early registration for on-site pickup. Also, as mentioned above, we will hold on to submitted activity book pages and print them for next year.

We’ll have more news about next year’s rescheduled Mysterium soon. In the meantime, keep in touch with people on Discord and dust off a Myst game you haven’t played in a while.

-The Mysterium Committee