I wanted to take a moment to wrap up Mysterium 2010, and look ahead to next year.

Mysterium 2010 was a great event. Thank you to everyone who came and hung out, participated in the marker mission, and made What Would Atrus Do yet another rousing success. Congratulations to the winners of those events, as well as the costume contest and the Ahyoheek Tournament. And thanks to everyone who watched our antics through the live stream and Cyan Chat, and to everyone who sent a Paper Person.

Special thanks this year go to MystWear, who provided tons of awesome gear for our swag bags and prize table. Major kudos and special thanks also go to E-Derby, who provided her own set of amazing custom-crafted prizes to fit this year’s Kadish Tolesa theme, as well as the super-nice textured backgrounds for the convention book. Further thanks of course need to go out to everyone on the committee who made this event happen, especially Odo, Church, and katransama, who did a great job of helping out over the weekend at the event.

If you have photos or videos of this year’s Mysterium, we encourage you to share them with us on Flickr. You can submit photos to our Mysterium 2010 Group, or tag your photo with mysteriumcon to have it show up on the front page of the Mysterium website. If you’ve uploaded something to YouTube, send us an email, or comment on our YouTube channel, and we’ll be sure to add your video to our favorites.

We’ll be posting prize winners and other convention tidbits (like the quote book entries for this year) over the coming week or so, once we’ve decompressed and all of the gear has made its way back to us from Minneapolis. I’m also hoping to get the WWAD entries for this year delivered to Cyan before too long, and will be providing photos and commentary from that trip.

To those of you who ordered a t-shirt for delivery after Mysterium, you should be receiving tracking numbers for those packages this evening. For those of you who did not get a chance to order a shirt before Mysterium, we are looking into various options for on-demand printing so that we can offer you the highest-quality shirts possible at a reasonable price.

Looking ahead to 2011, I’m sorry to say that I will be stepping down as co-chair of the planning committee. While planning and running Mysterium is a great deal of fun, it also requires a lot of hard work, and unfortunately I just don’t feel I can devote the time 2011 deserves to make it happen. This isn’t the end of the line, though! Church has graciously agreed to take my place, at least for now, and get the ball rolling on next year’s convention. I’ll be sticking around in smaller roles to do stuff like the convention book, but I won’t be herding the cats anymore.

I know we’re late in announcing a location for next year, and I apologize for that delay. We’re currently working on the form to solicit location suggestions from the community, and plan to have that up and operating by the end of the day, so keep an eye out for that announcement as it hits this site and the various community forums. We’ll also be running a poll in a few weeks, once we’ve sifted through the suggestions, to make a final determination on where we’ll be next year.

The website will also be updated over the coming week to get things ready for 2011. All of the 2010 stuff will be moved into the History section, and the building blocks for next year’s information will be put in place.

Okay, I’ve rambled on long enough. Thank you again to everyone who came to Mysterium this year, thank you to everyone who watched it unfold online, and thank you to everyone for your interest in next year’s convention. You are what makes Mysterium happen!

- Alahmnat

We’re just over a day away from the unofficial start of Mysterium tomorrow evening, and things are coming together nicely. Our swag gear has been delivered and stuffed into bags, convention books are here, the screen-printed t-shirts just arrived this morning, and our badges (complete with a mini schedule!) are all put together. It all looks fantastic! We even have an awesome banner to put at the registration desk, courtesy of Eleri.

I’m excited and also kind of panicked that we’re so close to the weekend. It’ll be one heck of a good time, and I hope everything goes according to plan. See you all at the hotel!

(Somebody stop me, I’m actually using the Mysterium Blog as a blog!  I’ve gone mad with power!  Or quite possibly just gone mad… )

Hey!

So, it’s November now, and I realize we’ve been pretty quiet despite the promises that we’d be far more on-the-ball with planning than things have been in past years.  Well, we’re working hard to make up lost time now, and are busy planning Mysterium 2009.  We expect to have a couple of polls out within the week that you can participate in to drive the planning process for next year.  The first poll will be going out to everyone who registered for Mysterium 2008 in Boston, to get one last feedback push from them on how we did.  The second poll will be open to everyone, and will be soliciting feedback on what you as a community would like to see in 2009.

Stay tuned, this is just the beginning!

- Alahmnat

Paper people is a Mysterium tradition where people who can’t make it sent pictures of themselves to be there in their place. There is usually a group picture taken with all of the paper people. You can still get yours in. Send your jpg to eleri@mysterium.net by Friday AM!

On that note, we’ve got a lot coming down the pike really soon, so stay tuned. We’re not dead (yet)!