Convention Book submissions are open!

Shorah b’shemtee everybahro and space pinecone lovers!

2014 is shaping up to be an awesome year for Mysterium, and we want to celebrate the amazing community that makes it possible by bringing back the Mysterium Convention Book for our 15th anniversary.

This year, we’ll be printing a 5.25″x8.25″ book for better portability. As with our older books, it will be a magazine-quality, full-color glossy publication printed through an on-demand print service. You can see examples of our older publications (and order your own copies if you want!) in our MagCloud store.

If you have a piece of artwork or short story that you’d like to see featured, check out this page for submission guidelines. You will be fully credited in the book, and you absolutely retain all rights to your work. The submission deadline is May 31st, but space in the book is limited, so get your submissions in soon! As a reminder, our theme this year is Riven, and it’s our 15th anniversary. You don’t have to follow the theme to have your content included, but if you need ideas, that’s a good place to start.

The convention book will be available to everyone who purchases a full weekend pass by July 4th as part of your ticket price. If you haven’t already, be sure to register, and while you’re there, check out our awesome t-shirts!

See you at Mysterium!

Hotel, Registration, and T-Shirts, Oh My!

Shorah Myst fans!

It’s been a little while since our last update, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy behind the scenes. In fact, we’ve got four big announcements for you today!

Hotel Reservations Open

We’re pleased to announce that we will be returning to the Comfort Inn University District hotel next year. The Comfort Inn was our gracious host in 2009, and we’re looking forward to seeing you all there again. We have a limited number of rooms available for $89.95/night, so get your reservations in now! See our Location page for more details.

Pre-Registration Open

Why not register to attend the convention while you’re booking your hotel room? That’s right, pre-registration is open! Weekend registration is $25 per person, which includes a convention book and a couple of extra goodies. Pre-registration closes on July 4th, 2014, but why wait? Register now!

Logos for 2014

We are absolutely thrilled to announce the winner of this year’s logo contest: Jeston Tigchon! He submitted a marvelous proposal for both the front and back designs that celebrates our 15th anniversary and our Rivenese theme this year, and it completely blew us away. Here’s the back:

Mysterium '14 Logo

Mysterium ’14 Logo

 

And here are the five front designs!

All of which leads us to our next announcement…

T-shirts Available for Pre-Order

Jeston’s amazing artwork is now available for pre-order in shirt form, and there’s an added bonus: you can pick which design will go on the front of your shirt! Yes, you can get any one of the front logo designs mentioned earlier on your Mysterium 2014 t-shirt (pre-order quantities permitting, see the link below for more information). If you can’t decide, we’ve got you covered with a 5-pack of shirts at a $10 discount versus buying them separately.

This year is pretty important to us, and we want to make sure that everyone who’s ever been a part of Mysterium can have a chance to pick up a 15th anniversary t-shirt. Now, even if you can’t make it to Mysterium in 2014, you can pre-order a shirt to commemorate 15 years of fun, friends, and community hijinx.

T-shirts are available in sizes from Small to 3XL, and for the first time, we’re also pleased to announce that we’re offering them in a women’s cut as well! For more information about pre-ordering, please visit check out our t-shirt information page.

More to Come

That’s all we have for now, but we hope it was worth the wait! We’ll have more announcements coming in the next few months as we get closer to convention weekend.

Cyan’s Kickstarter: Obduction

Obduction Concept Art

Greetings, Myst fans!

Have you been longing for a new game from Cyan? Well, now is your chance to help make it happen! Cyan is currently about half-way through the fundraising time on their Kickstarter campaign to develop Obduction, a new realtime adventure game that will be built using the cutting-edge Unreal 4 graphics engine. They’re trying to raise at least $1.1 million, and still have about $350,000 to go as of this writing. If you haven’t pledged yet, get to it! If you already have, please spread the word! With Mysterium coming back to Spokane next year, we’d love it if Cyan had something new to show off when we visit their offices, and we’re sure you would too :).

Click here to check out the Kickstarter!

2014 Logo Contest Now Open!

We are pleased to announce that the Mysterium 2014 logo contest is now open for submissions! Next year marks the 15th anniversary of our little convention, and our Age theme will be Riven (since 15 is divisible by 5, and Spokane is high desert country, you see ;)). While it isn’t a requirement, we would absolutely love to see designs that both incorporate Riven and commemorate our anniversary.

Submissions must be received by November 30th, 2013. You can submit either a front design, a back design, or both. More information about the design requirements, as well as where to send you entries, can be found on the contest details page.

We look forward to seeing your artwork!

– Alahmnat

Remembering Past Mysteria: A Call for Memories

Next year, Mysterium will turn 15. It’s a huge milestone, and one that deserves to be celebrated (and we will definitely be celebrating it!). Along the way, we’ve been to a lot of really cool places, made many lasting friendships, and formed tons of memories. Unfortunately, right now a lot of those recorded memories have fallen down the Internet rabbit hole, and even the Wayback Machine has a broadly incomplete record of this event’s history.

With our 15th anniversary on the horizon, we are looking to rebuild some of these lost or incomplete records of our past. We’ve (finally!) put information about every previous Mysterium in the History section of our website, and now we’re asking everyone for help in making sure those pages have as much information on them as possible. If you’ve ever been to Mysterium before, there are several ways that you can help:

  1. If you would like to share a written account of your attendance, please email your write-ups to web@mysterium.net.
  2. If you have a gallery of photos online, please email a link to that gallery to web@mysterium.net.
  3. If you’ve uploaded photos to Google+, please be sure to tag our Google+ page so that they appear in our Photos section there.
  4. If you’re on Facebook, please be sure to tag your photos with our Facebook page.
  5. If you have photos on Flickr, please add them to that year’s Flickr group, all of which are linked on our Mysterium Flickr account.
  6. If you have photos that you would like to share without signing up for Flickr or another service, you can send them to us directly, and we will put them in our Flickr photostream. Check out this page for more information.