Shorah everyone!

As we mentioned in our Mysterium 2019 Wrap Up, plans for Mysterium 2020 have been in the works. In the time since the committee departed Spokane, we have been hard at work nailing everything down. We are now excited to announce what everyone has been waiting for: Mysterium 2020!

Where is Mysterium 2020?

As hinted at by our post’s title, Mysterium will be held in Washington, DC for the first time ever!

Washington, DC offers a robust transportation system to connect visitors from a multitude of airports and train stations to downtown and the suburbs. Featuring free admission to museums and other attractions, the capital will have something to offer everyone in attendance this year.

When is Mysterium 2020?

As mentioned in the previous wrap ups, the dates for Mysterium 2020 are still being decided. While we intend to choose a specific weekend by mid-October, we can say that Mysterium will be held on a Friday through Sunday during late-July or early-August.

This past year, Sunday’s schedule was extended to accommodate all of the events we had planned, especially Saturday’s trip to Cyan. Mysterium 2020 will be returning to our traditional schedule, ending midday on Sunday (historically, around 1:00 PM).

Planning and outreach is well underway. Please watch for another announcement in the coming weeks with our selected weekend. The primary goal informing all our upcoming logistical decisions, including date selection, is to ensure Mysterium 2020 is accessible and fun for everyone.

Who’s Running Mysterium 2020?

This year’s Mysterium will be headed by no less than three con chairs! Longtime committee members Capella and Drew will be joined by a relative newcomer, Dan. Nicknamed the Mysterium Triumvirate, they hope to combine their enthusiasm and Myst and community knowledge to make one of the best Mysterium conventions yet. Following Mysterium 2019’s great success, they are eager to take on the challenge and wish Taniith the best as he takes a well deserved rest after his hard work this past year.

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We also know that many of you are eagerly awaiting more Mysterium 2019 recordings on our YouTube channel. There is still a lot of footage to get through, but we will make the recordings available as soon as we are able to. We thank you for your patience!

Be sure to follow @MysteriumCon on Twitter, the Mysterium Facebook Page, or our Discord server for Mysterium 2020 updates. We can’t wait to share more with you over the coming weeks and months!

– Mysterium 2020 Triumvirate: Capella, Drew, and Dan

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