Mysterium 2010: Minneapolis, MN

Events, and Ideas.

We are working to put together a great list of things to do for Mysterium attendees. We will be providing a wide variety of events so that you can pick and choose how to spend your weekend.

Here are a few things in the works:
* Kadish Tolesa theme -
The Bevin party and decorations from last year were a big success. Following suggestion from attendees, we are going to choose an Age every year as the overall theme. This year is Kadish Tolesa. Feel free to use this as a starting place for art or other things you might do for Mysterium. But don’t be afraid to do your own thing - everything is welcome.

* Trip to Mall Of America and MagiQuest -
The Mall of America is close by with their newest MagiQuest location. A bunch of us will be heading to MagiQuest, and you are invited. MagiQuest is not your thing? Come with us and browse the Mall of America with fellow explorers.
(Did we mention that there’s an entire amusement park inside of the Mall?)
http://www.mallofamerica.com/#/main/home/home

* What Would Atrus Do and Marker Missions -
These favorites from the past few Mysteriums will be returning. Team up to build gizmos from Atrus’ spare parts, or search for Markers with your friends.

* Fan Presentations -
A core Mysterium event is always the presentations from fans. We’ll be looking for fans and fan groups to come and share what they are doing and get other people involved.

* Puzzle Decathalon -
We’ll have several puzzles released all throughout the weekend for people to gnaw on in those quiet moments.

* Fan Displays -
Bring your Myst and D’ni themed art and projects to show off. Illustrations, poetry, whatever else. Also, we’ll have a ‘paper faces’ display for those who can’t be with us.

* More as we work it out!

What can you do to help?
Volunteer!
Mysterium is looking for volunteers to help run various events during the gathering, as well as help with running errands and other various tasks. Let us know if you are going to be there and are interested.

Hold your own event or presentation!
Do you have an event for Mysterium? Maybe a party idea, or a presentation or workshop? Let us know! We’re hoping to see a variety of activities, from presentations to workshops to games.

T-shirt/Logo and Convention Book Submission.

Mysterium is fast approaching and planning is on-going.

Time to start sharpening those pencils to come up with this years’ t-shirt and Official Mysterium Logo!

Due to the positive response from the Bevin decorations at last year’s event, we’ve decided to incorporate another Age into our decorations’ theme this year. The Age we’ve selected for 2010 is Kadish Tolesa. Feel free to use this theme as a source of inspiration for your logo designs and convention book submissions if you choose, but doing so will not be a requirement.

We have again issued nothing but the loosest of guidelines to let the creative juices of our D’ni community flow! Check them out

http://www.mysterium.net/mysterium-2010/logo-contest/

Submit your designs at the same site:

http://www.mysterium.net/mysterium-2010/logo-contest/

Dead line is May 31th. Submitt your creation and you may see your design at Mysterium 2010!

Convention Book Submissions.

Pictures, poems, D’ni recipes, fond memories of URU, give us your submissions for the 2010 book!

Last year’s book was popular and we’re looking to make this year’s even better.
We are looking for for URU inspired stories, art work, photos, sculptures, drawings, homemade Age renders or screenshots, stories, poems, songs, recipes for D’ni dishes… anything you’d like to showcase to the community! Check out last year’s book

http://magcloud.com/browse/Issue/25913

for ideas. As with last year’s book, we will be making it available for purchase online after the convention for those who were unable to attend.

Deadline for Convention Book submissions is June 30th.
Guidelines:

http://www.mysterium.net/mysterium-2010 … tion-book/

A new year… and time to start thinking about Mysterium! As previously announced, Mysterium will be held in Minneapolis, MN, and now you can have dates to go with your location!

Mysterium 2010
Minneapolis, MN
Aug 5th - 8th

The holidays slowed down the hotel process, but know that we’re looking at some reasonably priced facilities, with fantastic access to the airport and the Mall of America.

Keep your eyes open for announcements about the yearly Tshirt Contest, registration, presentations, and more!

Mysterium Gifts are Now Available!

We now have products from Mysterium 2009 available for purchase.
Didn’t get your Mysterium 2009 t-shirt? Want that nifty magnet with the Mysterium 2009 logo?
You can get it now.

Just in time for the holidays- we have 2 different styles of holiday Mysterium ornaments.

Mousepads, stickers, tote bags, kids stuff and more!

Take a look and help out support your Mysterium!

It’s all at : http://www.cafepress.com/mysteriumcon

Church
Mysterium Committee Member

Shorah!

We would like to introduce your 2010 Mysterium Committee members! This year, we have the privilege of some returning committee members, and the honor of some brand new members joining us for next years’ Mysterium. Without further ado, meet your 2010 committee and volunteers!

Co-Chairs: Alahmnat and Eleri
Treasurer: Odo
Secretary: Mesnab
Communications Lead: Church
Events Lead: Blade
Location Lead: TW
Registration Lead: Oscelot
Web Lead: TS Kimball
Cyan Worlds: Viki Almond

Volunteers (so far): Simon and nomad. wandering_nomad has volunteered to be our Minneapolis insider.

We are riding high from Mysterium ’09, when Mysterium returned home to Spokane, WA; Cyan was gracious enough to have us for a visit and a BBQ. We have some exciting things planned for Mysterium this year: new people and new ideas have been flowing, and we’ve put much effort into reorganizing our committee structure to ensure that planning is as efficient as possible. We look forward to working with the community to make Mysterium 2010 better than ever!

Church
Mysteruim Committee
Communications Lead

Ah, another Mysterium has come and gone with its own memories and stories to tell! After allowing everyone a chance to recuperate from that weekend, the Committee has some final bits of information to share with you about this year’s event.

Afflicted
We want to let everyone know that, in spite of few delayed cases, reports seem to indicate that everyone has recovered from the mysterious bug that began circulating on Saturday night. As far as we know, no Cyantists reported sick, and we are checking with the hotel to make sure the staff is okay. We’re going to be making a list of sanitary supplies to have on hand to help reduce the chance of something like this happening again for Mysterium 2010 and beyond.

Hotel Review
We had an amazing hotel staff for our event, there’s no doubt about that! If you haven’t already, we would ask that everyone who attended would show their appreciation by giving them a glowing review. We don’t think anyone can deny that they deserve at least that much from us. You may use the “Comment about your Stay” page at Choicehotels.com, and be sure to enter WA215 when asked for a hotel code.

Silverwood Refunds
Good news on the Silverwood front! They have promised us a 100% refund. The only downside is that it will take nearly a month to get a single check processed and sent back to the Committee. At that time, Odo, our Treasurer, will mail personal checks to all the individuals who signed up for Silverwood. In the light of this, we’d like to ask everyone who signed up for Silverwood to email Odo (odo@mysterium.net) to make sure that their mailing address information is accurate! We don’t want to accidentally leave anyone out.

Photo Galleries
We have been gathering links to galleries of photos taken by Mysterium goers and we would like to maintain a permanent list hosted on Mysterium.net! To make things easier for you, we have scoured the forums and compiled a list of galleries and videos that we were able to find. If you find that your gallery is missing, you may email GermanShepherd (germanshepherd@mysterium.net) to be included! (Or you may email him to have your links removed, if that’s your wish.) You may visit the list here: http://www.mysterium.net/mysterium-2009/photo-galleries/

We would also like to remind everyone that there is an official Mysterium 2009 Flickr Group Pool set up for people to post their photos to! You don’t need a Flickr account to view the pool, but if you have an account and you took photos that you want to share, we encourage you to add your own Mysterium memories to the pool. (It may not immediately apparently, but the pool will also accept videos, so feel free to share those, too!) We may also be contacting you directly to ask permission to post your photos to the Flickr pool ourselves, in case you don’t have the time.

Books
We are pleased to announce that the 20-page Mysterium 2009 Convention Book and 12-page Mysterium Cookbook are both available for purchase on MagCloud for those who wish to do so. The Convention Book is available for $5.00, and the Cookbook is available for $8.40. (If you’d like to save some money, MagCloud is holding a 20%-off sale from now until August 31st, so before that date the cost is $4.20 for the Convention Book and $7.92 for the Cookbook.) All proceeds from the purchase of these books will go toward funding future Mysteriums.

Because the Cookbook was originally promised as part of the Convention Book and needed to be separated due to cost and size constraints, we would like to offer the Cookbook to those who attended at a discounted price. If you attended Mysterium 2009 and would like a copy of the Mysterium Cookbook, please contact web@mysterium.net so we can send you the appropriate link.

Both the Mysterium 2009 Convention Book and the Mysterium Cookbook can be purchased online at http://mysterium.magcloud.com. Please be aware that MagCloud presently only ships to the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

On The Horizon
Since so many people were feeling the effects of the sickness on Sunday, prize distribution was canceled. However, we are going to Plan B in that regard and we are looking into mailing the prizes to the winners. We are also working to make additional t-shirts available for purchase online by anyone who was unable to get one. In addition to that, we’re also beginning to prepare a wrap up poll that will allow you to give feedback on how this year’s Mysterium was handled as well as allow you more opportunities to shape future events! We expect to have more information on these things in the near future.

And with that, we hope everyone had a great time at Mysterium this year (even in spite of that nasty bug) and we look forward to seeing you again in 2010!

For those still at the hotel and not the walking dead, lets meet outside the hotel at 8pm, walk to the park, watch the batty bats come out of the cave, walk a labyrinth, and say goodbye to another year of Mysterium

Yes, it’s true. Mysterium ended this year not with a joyous celebration of community, but with a whole lot of praying to the Great Porcelain God.

Sadly, 15-20 Mysterum attendees were struck with what was likely a fast-acting type of norovirus. The good news is that everyone is recovering quickly, and seems to be affected for less than 24 hours total.

So, many things were canceled and/or put on hold.
The Ahyoheek tournament will be decided by going over the existing results.
The Marker Mission winning team will get their participation prize in the mail, and we’ll draw a name for the big prize
WWAD team will be decided by popular vote on the website, look for the poll next week. Prizes will be handled the same as Marker Missions.
Other prizes will be handed out by drawing.
There will be online shirt ordering at some point.

We are in contact with Silverwood about refunds, but that may take some time, and we cannot guarantee a 100% return.

There were extra, unplanned expenses incurred, please consider dropping some change in the donation jar (button) on the right.

Shorah and care to you all,
~Eleri

On behalf of the entire Mysterium Committee, the Location Team is excited to announce that next year’s Mysterium will be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota!

The city for Mysterium 2010 was chosen through a combination of community-wide polling and much research. Because the top three cities on the poll turned out to be statistically tied (click here for the final numbers), we set out to do further research on each of the top cities to determine which was most ideal rather than let the randomness of the tie determine the location.

Minneapolis has a number of hotels to choose from that offer easy transit to and from the airport and provide the large meeting spaces we’ve come to rely on while maintaining affordable rates. The public transportation options provide a simple way around the city for those flying in, and those driving in will have an equally easy time of navigating the streets. Between museums like the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life and the 370,000-square-foot Science Museum of Minneapolis, the shopping centers like the famous Mall of America, and the many parks and lakes within the city to explore, we think the city provides everything needed for a Mysterium city!

In the end, Minneapolis was chosen not only for its top place in the poll and outstanding qualities in the above-mentioned areas, but also because a few locals have volunteered to personally check out hotels, and advise on local transportation options and attractions. The ability to have people physically go to an area and find out information is critical to making Mysterium as affordable and enjoyable as possible.

In closing, we’d like to thank all of you for your patience while we worked to select a city and we want to wish all those who are attending Mysterium 2009 right now an awesome, fun and safe trip! If you were unable to attend this year (like those of us on the Location Team), we hope you’ll be able to attend next year’s!

Shorah!
TW, Odo, GermanShepherd (Location Team), and the rest of the Mysterium Committee

As a quick update, as Mysterium 2009 is already well underway, there’s plenty of activity via Twitter, Flickr, ustream, in CyanChat, and on IRC at chat.mystlore.com, in the #mysterium channel. Stay tuned later this weekend for an announcement regarding Mysterium 2010!