Category Archives: News

Mysterium 2019: The Return to Spokane

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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.

—

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

Mass Mysteria November Update

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Greetings all!

This is the first update for our little Global Mysterium experiment, or “Mass Mysteria” as we’ve come to call it.

Spreading The Word

We’ve had a number of responses from possible local hosts, and over 100 sign ups on the mailing list, which is great! We’d love to reach more people though, so please help us by inviting other Myst fans to check out the original announcement post (here), and to join the mailing list.

Picking A Date

The next step is to pick a date for the event so that people have time to plan for it. We’ve decided to find a date on a May weekend in the hopes of avoiding months with major weather events. We also want to avoid any major holidays, so we’re asking you to help us out by filling out this form with possible dates. We’ll select one of those as the main date, as well as an alternate in the event that any one location has to cancel due to weather.

Host Cities

As far has host cities, here’s the list of possible locations that volunteers have submitted:

United States

  • Boston, MA
  • Providence, RI
  • Bangor or Portland, ME
  • Buffalo or Rochester, NY
  • Baltimore, MD
  • Tampa, FL
  • Boulder or Denver, CO
  • Seattle, WA
  • Portland, OR
  • Chattanooga, TN
  • Cleveland, OH
  • Columbus, OH
  • Los Angeles, CA
  • San Francisco, CA
  • Salt Lake City, UT

International

  • Sao Paulo, Brazil
  • Berlin, Germany
  • Saarbrücken, Germany
  • Lille, France
  • London, UK
  • Cardiff, UK
  • Melbourne, Australia
  • Nijmegen, Netherlands

Many thanks to the fans who have already offered to help host in their city. There’s still plenty of time, though! If you don’t see a city near you, consider becoming a host! At its simplest, all you need to commit to is proposing a public place for locals to meetup, and being available should anyone have trouble finding the group. If you would like to add yourself to the host list, you can do that here.

Activities & Comments

Finally, we’re hoping to put together some fun activities that groups can do during the event. This could be a photo-scavenger hunt, a puzzle packet, or anything else that requires minimal setup/resources. If you have any ideas for activities, or anything else, please drop us a line! You can reach us through social media, through our website, or by joining our Discord server.

Until next time,
-Taniith
Mysterium 2019 Chair

Announcing Global Mysterium

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Shorah friends

Happy #Myst25 day! Myst was first released 25 years ago today, and we thought we’d add to the celebrations by announcing a new project we’re working on: Global Mysterium Day.

(We’re still working on the name… Mass Mysteria, maybe?)

We often get messages like “you should bring Mysterium to X city,” or “will Mysterium ever come to Europe/Australia/etc?” We would love to bring Mysterium to every major North American city, but as an all-volunteer organization it’s just not possible. As for other countries, we’re always happy to give advice and support to any group trying to organize a Myst convention/gathering, but it’s such a daunting task that no one really wants to take it on.

In the past, it’s been a tradition for local groups to plan “mini-Mysterium” gatherings: local fans would all agree to meet in a nearby city on a specific date and time. Maybe they’d explore museums, or grab a bite to eat, or just sit in a park and nerd out about Myst. These mini-Mysteria were a way to meet and hang out with other Myst fans for a day without all the work of putting together a big convention.

We thought it’s about time we bring that back in a more significant form, to help people all over the world connect with other local Myst fans. Not everyone can travel to Mysterium, but maybe we can bring a little piece of Mysterium to everyone. And we need your help to organize it!

Our Role

We will pick a date and time sometime next year (probably a Saturday somewhere between February and April). Next, we’ll help build a list of local fans who will lead the groups in their cities. Then, we’ll publish the list of cities/meeting places and help get the news out to as many fans as possible.

On the selected day, groups around the world will meet up with other local Myst fans. We’ll provide suggestions for activities, possibly some puzzle packets or a fun photo scavenger hunt, but ultimately what you do is up to you and your local group. After it’s all over, we’ll aggregate stories and photos so the whole Myst community can see what different cities did during the day.

What We Need From You

We need three things from you:

First, signup for news about Global Mysterium here. We promise emails will be infrequent and not spammy.

Second, spread the news! This only works if we get as many people as possible to show up. Our posts reach a lot of Myst fans, but we know there are plenty more who don’t follow us because they can’t make it to our normal conventions. So help us by spreading this post around to every Myst fan you know!

Third, volunteer to help lead your local Mysterium group. This isn’t going to be a ton of work, but we need to have a local contact for each city we include in our list. You’ll be responsible for helping to pick a good meeting location, and we may ask you to share contact information so that folks who get lost can find your group on the day of the event. If that sounds like something you’d like to do, fill out this quick form here, and we’ll be in touch.

This hasn’t really been tried before within our community, so we’re figuring things out as we go. We’ll have more details for you as we get closer to the event, so stay tuned. We may even get some Cyan involvement, but we can’t promise anything just yet. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, you can always contact us through our website here.

Other News

We’re still working away behind the scenes on Mysterium 2019. Odo is doing his hotel dance, and we’re lining up some very special guests that we hope to announce in a few months.

Also, we know many people were interested in buying the exclusive pins we made for Mysterium 2018.

We have some left, so we’re selling them in sets of 3 for $20. We won’t be making them again, so if you want a set you should grab them while you can! You can find the store here: http://store.mysterium.net/. (We wish we could sell them to everyone, but unfortunately we are only able to ship them within the US)

That’s all for now. Until next time,

-Taniith
Your friendly neighborhood Esher

Mysterium 2018 Videos

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Greetings all,

It’s been just over a month since Mysterium and the committee is finally caught up on sleep. Well… most of us, anyway. On the bright side, we’ve been able to edit all of the videos from this year’s convention!

You can find all of the Mysterium 2018 videos in this handy YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxkV43WY77wEM8VMrtSOEKvdFtUHIoXdR

A few notes:

  • As previously noted, the Myst Documentary presentation was for attendees only and that video will not be posted
  • Due to several simultaneous technical snafus, Rob Santos’s presentation on making games was only partially recorded
  • The entire Mysterium Showtunes session is one long video, but jump-links to each performance can be found in the video description.

You can find all the showtunes lyrics we have in this Google Drive folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hQl0W3mvM1SEh8OC5AYI5zeE276qXKfs. If you wrote one of the songs that was performed but haven’t sent us the lyrics, please do so!

And with that, we officially wrap up Mysterium 2018. Stay tuned in the coming months for 2019 info. We also hope to have a very special announcement for you in late September to coincide with the Myst 25th anniversary date!

Until then,
-Taniith
Mysterium PR Bah’ro

Mysterium 2018 Wrap Up

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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!)