Hotel Booking Now Live

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Hello everyone! We hope you’re all having a promising start to the new year. Let’s kick things off with some announcements.

Hotel Booking

Hotel room booking is now available at our selected venue, the Westin Alexandria Old Town. Rooms are available for $100/night with included wireless internet and discounted parking. For more information about the hotel and the booking link, please head to our Location page.

Mysterium 2022 Location Bids

Mysterium is made possible by local efforts every year. Want us to visit your favorite city? Send us a location bid! Bids for Mysterium 2022 will be accepted through April 1st, 2021. For more information, including sample bids from previous years, visit our Location Bidding page.

Rollover Registration Update

Rollover registration emails were sent in early December. If you have questions, or did not receive one, please feel free to contact us through our Contact page.

 

Thank you all for joining us as we start 2021. We look forward to bringing you more exciting announcements over the coming months.

– The Mysterium 2021 Triumvirate: Capella, Dan, and Drew

Mysterium 2021 Registration Is Now Live!

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Greetings everyone! We are excited to share some updates for Mysterium 2021!

Registration Now Open

Registration for Mysterium 2021 is now available on our Registration page. Standard registration can be purchased for $30, while premium registration, which includes a t-shirt and any swag, can be purchased for $45 through April 30th. A link for hotel reservations will be posted on the Location page soon.

Before you jump in, we have a few additional notes about registration this year:

2020 Registration Rollover

If you purchased a Mysterium 2020 registration and elected to roll it over to 2021, please do not purchase an additional registration. We will contact all registrants who requested a rollover in the coming weeks to confirm and follow-up with a blog update. If you don’t remember whether you requested a rollover, please wait to see if you receive communication before re-registering.

Statement on COVID-19

The safety and well-being of our attendees is of utmost importance to the Mysterium Committee. As the state of the coronavirus is continually evolving, it is difficult to determine exactly how events or gatherings may look in July. That said, we reserve the right to require attendees to provide proof of vaccination against COVID-19 or a negative test prior to issuance of a badge and admission to the event space. Any such proof will be used solely for verification and will not be stored by either The Mysterium Convention or Falling Man Group.

As the situation solidifies in the coming months, we will be sure to provide updates as they are ready to be shared. Any associated policies will be listed on our Policies page, including any potentially relevant changes to our refund policy, if and when they are written.

T-Shirt Order Update

All T-shirts ordered this year have been shipped! Many thanks to Odo for single-handedly taking on such an immense operation. If you have not yet received your shirt or an email with shipping information, please contact us and include your order number.

Submissions

As a reminder, we are currently accepting event, Activity Book, writing, and art submissions from the community. For more information, please see our Submissions page.

 

Thank you all for your continued support; we hope you are all staying well and look forward to an opportunity to see everyone again soon. For our fans in the United States, have a safe Thanksgiving holiday.

–The Mysterium 2021 Triumvirate: Capella, Drew, and Dan

Mysterium 2021

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We’ve gone through your 2020 survey feedback and are now kicking off Mysterium 2021! We have a few announcements to share.

Survey Highlights

Thank you to everyone who filled out the Mysterium 2020 survey. It gives us valuable insight and ideas for future conventions. There were a few recurring themes we noticed from the results:

  • You’d like some additional new panels such as a discussion of the books. While we can’t promise anything since it’ll be dependent on special guests’ availability, we are looking into possible topics. If you have contact with a potential Myst-related special guest, please let us know via our Contact Us page.
  • Speedrunning and Unwritten were quite well received. Thank you to everyone who made those events happen!
  • Several people were unaware of streams and recordings from prior years. While this year was entirely online, we stream every year as best we can, excepting when panelists request us not to. We stream live on Twitch, and we post everything to our YouTube channel after the convention. A link to the YouTube playlist for a given year can also be found on the History page on our site.
  • We received several comments about Starry Expanse. While Mysterium provides a platform for announcements from fan projects, we are not directly involved in them ourselves and cannot guarantee regular presentations or updates. We encourage fan-driven projects to submit an event proposal should they have updates they’d like to share.

You may have noticed a new channel, #feedback, on our Discord server. This is for providing suggestions and feedback, either for the server or the convention itself.

T-Shirts

We know many of you are eager to receive the t-shirts you pre-ordered. Unfortunately the pandemic has made it difficult to collaborate on packing and shipping, but we are well underway. Shirts are being sent in batches, and we are around 75% complete. Please note that if you are outside the US, international shipping has been slow lately so it may take extra time for your shirt to reach you.

Mysterium 2021

As previously announced, Mysterium 2021 will be held July 16-18 in Alexandria, VA, just outside Washington, DC. We’ll continue providing information over the next few months, but to start things off, we’re opening submissions:

  • Have an activity you’d like to run during Mysterium? Event submissions will be open until May 31.
  • We’ll be printing an activity book similar to the digital one we offered during Mysterium 2020. Page submissions will be open until April 25. Note: All pages from the 2020 digital book will be printed for 2021, so if you submitted a page this year, you do not need to resubmit it unless you wish to update or correct it.
  • As always, we will have a writing and artwork table to showcase your creations. Please get these in by July 1.

More details, including information on how to submit your ideas and works, can be found on our Submissions page. This year’s t-shirt design will be the same as 2020. Pin designs were also previously selected earlier this year.

That’s it for now. We’ll be opening registration and hotel bookings in the next few months. In the meantime, happy Halloween and enjoy the Fall!

–The Mysterium 2021 Triumvirate: Capella, Drew, and Dan

Last Call for T-shirts

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Thanks once again to everyone for making this year’s Mysterium a success! We had over 800 people registered, and our peak on Twitch was over 6,000 viewers! We have a few updates to share as we wrap up the convention.

T-shirts

If you have been waiting until the last minute to order a t-shirt, well, now is the last minute. We will be closing shirt orders this Saturday (August 22), and the next time you will be able to purchase one will be for Mysterium 2021. If you ordered a shirt, we will be contacting you soon, and we plan to ship orders in September.

Survey

If you registered for Mysterium, you will be receiving a survey by the end of August. Please fill it out – it gives us valuable feedback on what worked, what didn’t work, and what you’d like to see at future conventions.

YouTube Videos

All of the videos from the convention are now on YouTube. The official events can be found in this playlist, and the watermelon videos and other fun stuff previously exclusive to Twitch can be found in this playlist.

We’ll have more news on Mysterium 2021 in the coming months. In the meantime, enjoy the last few weeks of summer!

–The Mysterium Committee

Almost Time!

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Mysterium is just a few days away! We have a few more items to cover before the convention starts.

Special Guests

We have even more guests to announce:
  • Adrian “Okaydrian” F.E. is a Twitch streamer and gaming host, having interviewed several famous names online as well as at Comic Con, PAX, E3, and the White House.
  • Eleri Hamilton is a curator for Cyan’s lore archival project, and a leader at Inkworks Productions and the game Unwritten.
  • Veronica Hamilton is the primary developer for Unwritten and part of the leadership at Inkworks Productions, now partnered with Cyan Ventures.
  • Claire “Shoom’lah” Hummel’s artwork has been a part of the Myst community for years, including concept art for Obduction and one of the two designs for this year’s convention t-shirt.
  • Karl Johnson started with Cyan in 2003. Having served several roles since then, he is currently a developer, paying particular attention to comfort and motion sickness in VR.
  • Eva “laughingpineapple” Jucci has contributed a variety of artwork, writings, and cosplays over the years.
  • Blake Lewin is a thirty year veteran in the games industry. He helped to revive Uru on Gametap, and wrangled the rights to Myst III and IV back to Cyan from Ubisoft.
  • Nate Lewin has handled sound design for numerous games, films, and TV commercials, as well as recording several of his own experimental projects.
  • Keith “Tweek” Lord has been contributing artwork to the Myst community for the past 20 years. He also really likes waffles.
  • Jamey Scott was the audio director for Myst III with Presto Studios. He is currently the sound designer for the HBO series Raised by Wolves.

See their full bios and the rest of the list on our special guests page.

Streaming & Zoom

There has been some confusion as to the use of Twitch, YouTube, and Zoom. The events on the schedule page are color-coded according to where you’ll find them. Events shown in blue are streamed to both Twitch and YouTube. Events shown in red are streamed exclusively to YouTube. Links can be found on the schedule below each event’s description. None of these items require Zoom to view them.

The third category, green, is for discussion rooms, which will be held on Zoom (think of the un-conferences and casual discussions that typically pop up during an in-person Mysterium). While the Twitch and YouTube streams will be available for public viewing, you will need to be registered for Mysterium, and must download Zoom, to participate in any of those discussion rooms. We will be sending an email to registered attendees later this week with more details on how to join those rooms.

TL;DR – Other than the discussion rooms, everything on the schedule will be viewable through YouTube and Twitch. Zoom is only needed to join discussion rooms.

Also, the nature of an online convention means that we’re able to hold multiple events at the same time this year. Don’t worry, though – all events (except for discussion rooms) will be recorded and posted to YouTube for you to watch later.

Digital Activity Book

As mentioned in previous posts, the activity book we had planned for this year’s Mysterium is available for download in a digital format. Click here to download the activity book, and here for the solutions.

We will provide more information later this year about the printed book for next year’s in-person convention.

Discord Channel Updates

We are reorganizing the Mysterium Discord server with some new channels to use during the convention. To make it easier for you to know where to post, we’re putting everything in a brand new category: Mysterium 2020 Online! The full list of new channels and their descriptions can be found in the #rules channel on the Discord server.

Unwritten @ Mysterium

You might have seen on our calendar that Eleri and Vee will be running an Unwritten campaign during this year’s convention! You still have a couple more days to sign up (please do so by August 5), using this form.

Hope to see you all online this weekend!

–The Mysterium Committee