Greetings!

It’s time for everyone’s favorite post of the year: the Mysterium kickoff! If you missed our previous announcement, we are excited to bring Mysterium back to the home of Cyan — Spokane, WA — for Mysterium 2019. This year’s Mysterium will be chaired by Taniith.

When is Mysterium 2019?

Mysterium 2019 will be held on the first weekend of August, running from Friday, August 2nd through Sunday, August 4th.

We have many exciting events planned for you all this year. However, in order to accommodate everything, we have decided to extend Sunday’s schedule. This year, Sunday (and, thus, the Convention) will end at 4 PM, giving us about four more hours for activities. We want to make sure everyone is aware of this change before you begin making travel plans. Please be sure to spread the word!

20 Years of Mysterium

It’s hard to believe, but this year marks 20 years of Mysterium! As such, we felt it would only be appropriate to make Mysterium 2019’s theme: “Mysterium Through the Ages.” We’ll also feature some additional elements from Ahnonay. Who doesn’t love some time magic (and quabs)?

We are truly honored to have reached this landmark. It’s incredible to have such a dedicated and passionate community. Without your participation, we wouldn’t be here today. As such, we plan to pull out all the stops and make this a Mysterium to remember. We already have events and puzzles in the works, Cyan has confirmed that they will be involved in this year’s convention (including a visit to Cyan HQ), and we are reaching out to a few “special guests”… but that’s another blog post.

As always, we need some participation from the community to make Mysterium a reality:

Logos of Mysterium Past

We’ve had many beautiful shirt logos over the years, and we want to do something interesting with them to commemorate our anniversary. Unfortunately, we are missing quite a few of them, and we only have low-res copies of several others! If you made logos in years past, or know the people that did (many are listed in our history section), please please please send the highest resolution copies you have to logo@mysterium.net. In particular:

• Logos from 2000-2007 are either missing or low resolution
• 2008, 2009, 2013 we have a mix of resolutions

We’ll even take high-res photos of shirts from 2000-2007, if that’s all we can get. Thank you in advance!

Logo Contest

Speaking of logos, Mysterium 2019 Logo submissions are officially open! We encourage you to integrate the number 20, “Mysterium Through the Ages,” Ahnonay, Spokane, or Cyan in your designs. More information about the design requirements and submission process can be found on the Logo Contest page. Submissions are due by by Friday, January 4th.

If your logo is selected you will receive a free Mysterium shirt, and possibly some other swag too!

Artwork

Logos aren’t the only artwork submissions this year! The fabulous Kelly/Rayne has begun spearheading a project to put together a coloring book for attendees. We also plan to make several new exclusive enamel pins for next year.

We’re trying to stagger artwork deadlines, so stay tuned for more details on how to submit artwork for those in the coming weeks.

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Be sure to follow @MysteriumCon on Twitter, the Mysterium Facebook Page, or our Discord server for Mysterium 2019 and Mass Mysteria updates. We have a lot of awesome things planned for our 20th anniversary, and we can’t wait to share more with you over coming weeks and months!

-Mysterium 2019 Committee

Hi everyone!

Well, this week brings to a close an incredible 19 years of Mysterium. It thrills me to know that after all of that time, people are still excited enough to turn out – nearly 80 of you this year, including an exceptional number of new faces! We want to cover a few points while we still have your attention:

Feedback and Wrap Up

While we welcome feedback any time, we’ve compiled a few questions that we hope you’ll be willing to answer for us, attendee or not. These surveys help to inform our choices for future years. The majority are multiple-choice, so we hope it’ll be pretty quick to get through. You can find the survey at: https://goo.gl/forms/wHwM2yOGKucXsicJ3.

Around the end of the month we’ll publish a round-up of the photo album links and Mysterium Showtunes song lyrics that we’ve received. So if you’d like your photos or songs to be included, please head over to the contact form and let us know where we can find them! By that time we also hope to have the recordings of the weekend edited and uploaded into a playlist on YouTube.

Please remember to set any photo albums to be publicly viewable, especially for albums on Facebook!

Thank Yous

It takes many hundreds of volunteer-hours to bring everything you saw over the weekend to fruition. Thank you for those bold (or crazy?) enough to volunteer to bring Mysterium to a brand new city with me this year: Capella, Drew, M13, Rayne, Strix, and Taniith. Thank you to Teagen for volunteering early on to lend us local expertise and on-site cat-herding. Thank you to the Mysterium spouses and parents who, despite indifference to Myst, participated in our merriment with good attitudes.

Thank you to our presenters: Rob Santos, Hollister of the Starry Expanse team, and Philip Shane of the Myst Documentary, all of whom bring much more variety to the Mysterium experience than any of us can muster alone.

Thank you to our contest prize donors: K’laamas, Kefrith, Lex, Parker, Rayne, and Robert!

Thank you to Memiki for another year of delicious cookies.

Thank you to Cyan, and especially Ryan Warzecha, for tolerating our crazy and persistent requests with grace. And, thank you to the outstanding hotel staff this year; they were extremely proactive and flexible as small changes were needed throughout the weekend.

Mysterium 2019

As confirmed by Cyan on Sunday, we will be holding Mysterium’s 20th anniversary gathering in Spokane, WA on the weekend of August 2-4th, 2019! We expect that Mysterium will pay a visit to Cyan again this year, although we do not yet have a firm plan in place with them. If any Spokane local is available to, at the least, help scout hotels as we get close to making final decisions, please get it touch with us. We’re also hoping to introduce a few more pleasant surprises again in 2019, as well as revisiting events you enjoyed this year.

Taniith will be the con chair for 2019. Stay tuned here and on social media for more information.

Don’t forget to join the Mysterium Discord server to stay in touch with other attendees and the committee!

Until next time,
-Odo
Mysterium 2018 Co-Chair

(Praise Gehn!)