End of Year News

Posted on December 26, 2022December 26, 2022 by taniith

Shorah everyone!

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from us. We know you all want to know when we’ll be announcing the hotel and opening registration – things are moving forward there, and we expect to announce that in mid-January. In the meantime, here are some updates, announcements, and reminders:

Pin Submissions

As in recent years, we’re going to make a batch of exclusive enamel pins for Mysterium, and we invite you to submit your designs.

Some examples of our past exclusive pins

The community has made some amazing designs in past years, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with! Submissions are open until February 12th. Check out all the details here.

Other Submissions

Reminder that submissions for shirt designs and events are currently open. Shirt design submissions close on January 7th, so be sure to get them in by then!

Community Prompt Winners

We have two prompt winners to announce in this post. First, October. We received a bunch of great submissions for October’s topic of “Spooky”, including a few from some newcomers to these prompts. We’re happy to announce the winner is IwonK!

Next, for the month of November and the topic of “Fall”, we decided to try something a little different and let the community vote on their favorite. By a close vote, laughingpineapple’s Yeesha took the lead!

Submissions for this month’s prompt, “Endings”, are still open on our Discord. We’ll be continuing the community voting going forward, so check there in January to vote on the December submissions.

Policy Updates

Lastly, we’ve made some updates to our policies. As always, you can find all of our policies here, but below is a rundown of the major changes:

Privacy Policy
- Added new Room Block section, detailing information the hotel may share with us
Other Policies
- Adjusted how ages are handled for the minor and drugs/alcohol policies, to take into account legal age limits other than US federal ones
- Added ‘medical devices’ to the harassment policy
- Added a badge replacement policy
- Updated photo/video policy to include language about official recording/streaming
- Added an animals policy
- Added a sales policy

That’s all we have for now – be sure to check back in January for more. Until then, we hope you all have a happy new year, and that you stay safe and healthy.

– Rayne & Taniith
Mysterium 2023 Co-Chairs

Mysterium 2023 Kickoff

Posted on October 20, 2022October 20, 2022 by taniith

Greetings friends,

Fall has started and spooky season is upon us, so it’s time to formally kickoff Mysterium 2023 planning! Let’s jump right in:

Mysterium 2023 Dates

We know everyone has been anxiously awaiting the dates for next year’s event, and the wait is now over. Mysterium will take place from June 30 to July 2, 2023.

“But wait!” we hear you cry. “Mysterium is always at the beginning of August!” Well, that’s true, we always aim for early August (or late July if necessary), but our hands were tied this year. It turns out that Spokane has become a popular city for events since we were last there, and they were basically booked solid for July and August. So we took the best compromise we could find, and snagged this weekend just before the 4th of July.

We can’t give you all of the hotel details yet, but we want to give you a heads-up that Spokane’s popularity has also resulted in price increases. We’re doing everything we can to keep our room costs down where our attendees expect (many thanks to our master negotiator Odo!), but plan for rooms to be pricier than usual. Not astronomically high, mind you, just higher than usual.

We promise we’ll get you more details as we have them, so stay tuned!

Mysterium Theme

As you may know, 2023 marks the 30th anniversary of Myst’s release. In honor of that milestone, we’ve chosen to make this year’s theme ‘The Evolution of Myst‘.

That’s not just talking about the age of Myst. We mean the game/world as a whole. There have been many revisions and additions to Myst over the years, not least of which is Cyan’s recent version from 2020. The world and the franchise have evolved over the years, and we want to showcase that evolution. Which is a fun segue into our next topic…

Submissions

Get those creative juices flowing, because we’re opening up a couple submissions today!

First up is t-shirt artwork. Every year we invite the community to create artwork to go on our coveted Mysterium t-shirts. We think there are a lot of cool directions you could take with this year’s theme, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with. You can find all the details on the shirt art submissions page. The deadline is January 7, 2023.

As always, the creators of the winning designs will each receive a free t-shirt. And, similarly to the past couple of years, the shirt design will be added to your wardrobe in Uru!

If you have any questions about the shirt art submissions, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can either email us, or DM Rayne (our resident art wizard) over Discord.

Second, we’re opening up event submissions. Have a project you want to show off? A deep dive into D’ni architecture you want to present? An awesome group activity? Well now is your chance! Head over to our event submissions page and send it over to us. The deadline is April 29, 2023.

Discord Housekeeping

We recently performed some minor housekeeping in our community Discord server. Most importantly, we’ve revised and clarified our server rules. There shouldn’t be any big surprises – most of this was codifying what we had already enforced – but please check out our #rules and #announcements channels when you have a chance.

We are also now a verified server, which means we get a fancy custom invite link. So if you have friends that haven’t joined yet, send them over to https://discord.gg/mysteriumcon!

September Prompt Winner

We received 4 wonderful submissions to September’s prompt of “Rest/Sleep.” It was tough selecting a winner, but laughingpineapple‘s submission of a very tired Atrus just edged ahead:

There’s still time to submit something for our October prompt (“Spooky”) – head over to the Mysterium Discord to find out all the details.

That’s all for now. We’ll have more updates for you in the coming weeks and months.

Stay healthy out there!

-Taniith & Rayne
Mysterium 2023 Con Chairs

Mysterium Returns Home

Posted on September 29, 2022September 29, 2022 by Shadow Dan

Hello all! This will be my last blog post for quite some time (you can stop celebrating now), as I am handing off the reins to next year’s co-chairs - although first a few 2022 housekeeping details.

YouTube Videos

If you’d like to relive any moments from this past year’s convention, all YouTube videos from Mysterium 2022 are now available on our channel.

Survey Highlights

Thank you to everyone who filled out our 2022 survey. There were a few responses we’d like to highlight:

Meow Wolf went over quite well. We’ll look into similar excursions for future locations. (Chair’s note: I’m really glad people enjoyed this. I went there in January and my immediate reaction was “we have to do this during Mysterium”).
Cavern Feud was well-received. We’ll see if we can come up with enough questions to do it again, but regardless, we’ll aim for any game show events to involve larger groups like this.
A number of people asked about the possibility of ASL or captions. An ASL translator is most likely out of our budget; however, while we cannot yet make any promises, we are looking into captioning options for 2023.

August Prompt Winner

We received what might have been a record number of submissions for August’s topic of "Travel" and this was not an easy one to choose. However, we ultimately had to go with laughingpineapple’s submission of the three siblings on a trip together:

Mysterium 2023

As you may have heard at the end of this year’s Mysterium, we will be heading to Spokane for 2023! Cyan has once again invited us to their area, and we hope to see you all join us there. We have not yet determined dates, but we hope to announce those sometime this fall. That said, I’d like to introduce you to next year’s co-chairs:

Elliot "Taniith" Borenstein - Known primarily for chairing several Mysteria over the past 10+ years, you may also recognize him from his brief stint in the early 90s on the hit U62 show, "Cooking With Esher". Despite saying in 2019 that he would never chair a Spokane year again, his plan to talk Kelly into the role backfired spectacularly, leading to their partnership this year.

Kelly "Rayne" Coston - Kelly hails from the Pacific Northwest and has been drawing since she could crawl. Her days are usually filled with coffee, running a small business, and staring at her screen until art magically appears. Her evenings are usually filled with husband or cat snuggles and video games. A long-time Myst fan, she discovered her Myst family in 2014 and quickly joined the staff as the primary Creator of All Things Pretty and the Tormenter of Attendees on the Puzzle Team. She and the other members of the Puzzle Team are looking forward to tormenting attendees with brain melting puzzles this year!

Once again, thank you to all who joined us for Mysterium 2022 in Denver, whether in person or online. I’m glad I was able to welcome so many of you here, and look forward to seeing you all in Spokane.

Dan
Mysterium 2022 Chair

Thank You!

Posted on August 29, 2022August 29, 2022 by Shadow Dan

It’s been about two weeks since Mysterium. Most committee members have returned home and hopefully gotten some rest, and your Chair decided to attend another convention the immediate following weekend so “rest” has been a relative term.

Survey

As is tradition, we have our post-Mysterium survey. We have once again dispatched with asking you to write a novel as we did in the past, although it is a little longer than last year since we have questions about both the online and in-person events. Whether you joined us online or in-person, we’d like to hear your feedback! We’d also like to particularly highlight the future planning section, as we are cognizant of costs to attendees and would like to hear opinions on the potential trade-offs we may have to make while looking at those costs. The survey is available at https://forms.gle/xkUTNie9vuoNCPt59.

YouTube

Videos from Mysterium are currently available on our Twitch channel (https://www.twitch.tv/mysteriumcon), and are in the process of being uploaded to YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/mysteriumcon). We’ll follow-up in the next post once all videos are ready.

Thank You

We’d like to thank all attendees, since you are the reason this event exists. To those of you who made it out to Denver: it was great to have you in person and hopefully the altitude didn’t bother you too much. To anyone who joined online: thank you for watching and conversing through Twitch and Discord.

A thank you as well to all of our panelists who gave their time to answer everyone’s questions, the individuals who submitted presentations, and the committee members who couldn’t be physically present this year. While some of us were highly visible throughout the weekend (and you couldn’t avoid me if you tried), there were plenty more working behind the scenes, helping plan this event.

There are also a couple names in particular we’d like to highlight. One is Katie Postma, who helped with moderating Twitch, moderating panels, finding special guests, and putting us in touch with the Area Man Lives team. The other is Jeff Lanctot, who handled all the Cyan wrangling, ensuring the Cyan update video and Cyan Q&A happened; as well as helping us contact the teams for Walkabout Mini Golf and The Last Clockwinder.

It has been a pleasure serving as your chair this past year. I was happy to welcome so many of you to Denver, and I’d personally like to thank everyone who made Mysterium in my backyard a success.

Dan
Mysterium 2022 Chair

Rocky Mountain High

Posted on August 5, 2022August 5, 2022 by Shadow Dan

Hello! Mysterium is only a week away, and we’re looking forward to seeing you all in Denver!

Special Guests

We have a final set of guests to announce from Cyan, The Myst Documentary, and Myst IV: Revelation.

Eric Anderson has been with Cyan for several years, contributing to Uru, Myst V, and Obduction.
Rand Miller co-founded Cyan and brought us Myst, Obduction, and all the other Cyan titles that are the very reason for this convention’s existence.
Joshua Reinstein is an editor and researcher for The Myst Documentary.
Guy Sprung is an accomplished thespian, but Myst fans should know him as Achenar from Myst IV: Revelation.

Hotel & Transportation

As mentioned previously, parking at the hotel will be free. If you are local and only parking for the day, you will not have to pay for parking unless you leave your car at the hotel overnight. For anyone staying at the hotel, if you booked at the Mysterium rate, your parking will automatically be comped.

The hotel offers a shuttle to provide transportation within a 2-mile radius. This includes the Central Park A Line station. It runs 6 AM to 11 PM. When you need a pickup, call the hotel at 303-321-3500.

For more information, see our Location page.

Cyan Q&A

A quick reminder that the Cyan Q&A will not be accepting live questions during Mysterium. If you have a question you’d like the team from Cyan to answer, submit it by August 7 via this form.

Writing & Artwork Table

The deadline for submitting entries to the writing and artwork table has passed; however, if you have a late submission you would like to display, please bring it to Denver and we’d be happy to feature it on the table.

July Community Prompt

We had some excellent submissions in July, but we particularly want to feature Talashar’s story “Future Motion”: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40537716.

I am very much looking forward to meeting you all in person next week!

Dan
Mysterium 2022 Chair