Category Archives: News

Event Submissions Now Open

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Greetings!

We hope everyone had a wonderful start to the new year. To kick off 2020, we have a few brief updates to share.

Event Submissions

Event submissions are now open! As always, Mysterium is a success thanks to the wonderful events and presentations from our attendees. To keep things interesting, we like to offer a variety of group activities, fan presentations, panels, open mic time, and more.

This year, we will again offer time for “Microtalks.” If you have something you’d like to present, but don’t want to make a full 30-60 presentation, try a microtalk. We want to provide everyone with accessible opportunities to share their ideas or work, so we hope this will be a useful option for attendees. Visit the event submissions page for more details.

Event submissions are due no later than Sunday, May 31st, 2020.

T-Shirt Design Submissions

As a reminder, T-shirt design submissions are currently open and will be accepted until Sunday, February 16th, 2020. We encourage you to include elements of this year’s theme (Sirrus vs Achenar/Red vs Blue/Haven and Spire) or host city in your design. The creator of the selected design will receive a free Mysterium 2020 T-shirt. For full details, please visit the T-Shirt Design Submissions page.

Other Submissions

As a general reminder, we are also accepting submissions for enamel pin designs, activity book pages, and our Writing & Art Table. Check the Mysterium 2020 Submissions Overview page for full details and deadlines for all of these.

Location Updates

We recognize that attendees may already be pricing out travel options. To assist with your planning, we recommend that attendees flying to Washington, D.C choose Reagan National Airport (DCA) as their destination, if possible, for better public transportation connections. Additional location details will be available soon.

That’s all from us for now. We’ll have more news for everyone soon!

– Mysterium 2020 Triumvirate: Capella, Drew, and Dan

Mysterium 2020 Art Submissions

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Greetings! Hopefully everyone has recovered from their Thanksgiving food comas.

We’re pleased to announce it’s now time to send in your art submissions for Mysterium 2020! This year we’ll have four categories:

  • T-shirt design
  • Pins
  • Activity book – NEW!
  • Writing & artwork table

Deadlines will be staggered through early-to-mid 2020. Read on for details.

T-shirt design

Now that we have a theme selected, it’s time to create T-shirts. We encourage you to incorporate Sirrus vs Achenar, Red vs Blue, Haven and Spire into your design. Also feel free to tie in our host city of Washington, DC. If your design is selected, you will receive a free Mysterium shirt! The deadline for this will be Sunday, February 16. More information can be found at our T-Shirt Design Submissions page.

Pins

First introduced in 2018, we are once again planning a set of enamel pins. If you aren’t up for creating a logo but still want a creative outlet, pin design is an easier and faster process. The deadline for these will be Sunday, March 15. Check out the Pin Submissions page for more info, and look at the 2019 designs for inspiration:

Activity book

New this year, we’re putting together an activity book for Mysterium. Want to create a coloring book page? Word search? Crossword puzzle? Submit it by Sunday, April 19. See our Activity Book Submissions page for more details.

Writing & artwork table

Want an opportunity to showcase your Cyan-related artwork or writing? We will once again have a display table to show off your talent! Annacat has again graciously offered to handle this. Details can be found here. All content must be in by Friday, July 31.

That’s it for now. More news to come soon!

Mysterium 2020 Triumvirate: Capella, Drew, and Dan

The Official Mysterium 2020 Date and Theme Announcement

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Shorah everyone!

A new month has arrived and with it comes news about Mysterium 2020! The committee has been hard at work since we last updated, so we’re excited to share the latest with all of you.

When is Mysterium 2020?

This year, in an effort to maximize our hotel options and keep Mysterium accessible and fun for everyone, we broke with our tradition of holding Mysterium on a fixed weekend. After reviewing numerous proposals, we can now say that Mysterium 2020 will be held August 7th – 9th, 2020!

We are still in final negotiations and expect to have information about our selected venue soon. Please look forward to an update on this in the coming weeks.

For the Brothers

In all of our years, we have yet to theme our weekend around anything from Myst IV: Revelation. The Committee felt that it was a perfect time to break that pattern and select Haven and Spire as our theme. Red and blue, Sirrus and Achenar, crystals and mangrees… we hope to have a bit of everything brotherly represented this year. Two of our Committee members, Rayne and Lutra, have already started planning some decorations and music to help set the mood. We’re excited to see what they can come up with!

Relive Mysterium 2019

Missing Mysterium 2019? Or perhaps you missed Mysterium 2019? We’re excited to announce that this year’s event recordings are now available on our YouTube channel. We want to give a huge shoutout to Taniith for his hard work sifting through the hundreds of gigabytes of footage we collected this year. We hope you enjoy! You can find a playlist of all the videos here.

Additionally, we’ve gathered song lyrics and poems from Open Mic Night for you to read at your leisure here. Many thanks to everyone who participated in the event this year.

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That’s it for today. Be sure to follow @MysteriumCon on Twitter, the Mysterium Facebook Page, or our Discord server for Mysterium 2020 updates.

– Mysterium 2020 Triumvirate: Capella, Drew, and Dan

Mysterium 2020: From One Washington to Another…

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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

Mysterium 2019 Wrap Up – Part 2

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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