Alright, it’s the last full day in New York and the last day of Anime NYC, I don’t have any real unfulfilled missions and I am fairly satisfied with my purchases and merch but you never know man, there’s always more you can buy if you take your time to look at things that you might have missed. Lest to say I did end up buying a few more things but yea, no regrets here. Gotta make use of my time so see how things went today.
Knowing what I know now, I am doing it right. Eating what any New Yorker would do, eat breakfast then do your shit, in particular bagels again. I saw on google map that there was another highly rated bagel place on the walk from my hotel to the convention center called Finn’s Bagels so decided to check that out.
It was pretty busy inside with a good chunk of today’s customers right now being con goers since you can tell if they are in cosplay or wearing anime merch/have badges. Finn’s bagel is interesting if not a bit confusing because nowhere does it actually say they have a bacon/sausage egg and cheese bagel. I think it’s kind of assumed to be under the normal bagels? I only knew they had that because he buy before me ordered it so yea. Weird
Similar to yesterday but this time I got a bacon egg and cheese on everything bagel. Their everything bagel has more seeds and stuff on it and their egg is much larger and gooey as well as the cheese. The bacon was very crisp, almost too crisp since when you bite it, bacon chunks would crumble off and you have to pick them up to eat again. I was able to get a table/seat at the place and for the first time actually have a sit down within the store to eat my bagel and coffee that I ordered. Compared to yesterday’s breakfast bagel sandwich, I prefer this one, as I think it’s overall better, the bagel and even the ingredients inside. I don’t think this place has a sausage option tho, just bacon. So then, out of the three bagel breakfasts that I had, I would rank this the best for it’s purpose of breakfast, second being the cream cheese and lox and the sausage one from yesterday. All still very good but this one just hit different, maybe cause it was still hot and I was sitting down for once? lol
Fast forward to lining up a bit and waiting before entering and getting back to the main hall, the hololive booth had FuwaMoca doing a QA audience session on their main screen which is kinda cool. I didn’t say long as I had business and shopping to tend to however. In terms of entering and line management of the con I have no complaints in general which is really good to be honest.
The going rate for posters and prints now is generally standard prints are $25 if you are moderately confident in your art and have good printing/good paper. If you know your art is super good and or the paper is like really high quality all the best/good artists sell for like $35. If you are not as confident or feel intimidated or you know your art is lacking to others, you are selling at $20. I don’t think there was anybody selling prints for less than $20 although all did some kind of deal like buy 2 get one free shit. Mind you this is USD so if you convent to CAD it’s considerably higher lol.
It looks like our old friend “Initial D” man and his friend which also draws initial d cars stuff were having some display problems when I walked by this moment. Pretty bad luck to have your display coming down and not holding together on the last day of the convention but shit happens I guess. I noticed that they have a print of MF Ghost on the bottom, yas, I’m sure they are pleased with MF Ghost having an actively airing anime now this season, it means they can keep drawing cars and still be relevant.
Not sure if this is a new thing or something starting up only in NYC but bling bling drip anime themed shoes? What? Would you ever wear these or are they just for collection and display maybe? I can’t see these being used since some have like wings and shit on them so I have no idea man. It also felt just a little bit racist how most of people paying attention to this booth were black; I mean, stereotypes are stereotypes because they are true sometimes I guess?
Not pictured here is my time spent getting the autograph for the production staff for Oshi no Ko. Damn man shit. I did it lol. I originally wasn’t going to get all the autographs that I won but as the convention went on I felt like it was such a waste to not get them, it was a lottery win after all, and I’m sure hundreds, if not thousands of others applied for the same autographs. So in the end, I got all 4 autographs that I had won. Shiet lol. I ended up missing the i☆Ris idol performance/concert but that’s ok. I walked back to the hololive live booth and Cali was on doing a karaoke stream singing the Macross Frontier song with a duet with herself, or rather “Calvin”, her male clone/alter ego using a voice changer lol jokes. Man, Cali works too much, I thought she was on vacation. Even right now as I’m writing this, she is playing minecraft with Bijou in a collab, lol why.
I decided to do another pass at the more industry/shop area and realized I missed going into to Kinokuniya booth. They had hololive merch for this convention too which I had saw before that I forgot about lol. Damn. Everything was still in stock except for one members. Shit. All the Irys merch is long gone, she is my favorite hololive vtuber so that kinda sucks, but at least this merch was no big loss, I would have just brought an acrylic stand or key chain anyways, but yea, too bad. I think it proves true then that Irys is fairly popular among Hololive EN, maybe in general even with JP/ID cause even Miko’s stuff didn’t sell out.
After the failure of not getting into the “Night of Music” free concert yesterday I wanted to at least see the place where I failed to get a seat in. Hmm, interesting. It’s actually not that big at all which is kind of a shame. The concert area for Suisei’s concert and later today’s Hololive IDs concert is easily like double or three times this size. One reason why they had the concert in this place from my talking with other attendees in line is because of Crunchy Roll. This entire wing/pavilion of the convention center is literally Crunchy Roll town and they wanted it to use it for their guests. I’m pretty sure all the artists are only here because of Crunchy Roll association/connections so yea, I guess it makes sense.
After checking out Crunchy Roll town I headed to see the Hololive Indonesia concert which was free to all except reservation needed. In terms of capacity, I would say it was about 70-80% filled which is not bad for being basically the last big event of the convention before ending early at 4pm.
I had brought an official AnimeNYC glowstick today because I felt like it. For the Suisei concert I brought my own. I forgot to bring those today with me so I brought one from the official con merch booth in the morning. It’s nice, it’s very similar/the same kind that I got from the LoveLive Sunshine concert at AX back in 2018 with arrows to preview the colors before you select it. I wish they had a hololive themed one however, maybe next year lol.
After the concert or just before it, I can’t remember is when I took this photo. Honestly, the ID concert was amazing, maybe even better than Suisei concert because of just 1 member, there are 4 members involved. This mini concert was I suppose meant to help promote the much larger ID concert that they are working on and only had Kobo, Ritsu, Moona and Reines but man, those guys can really perform with excellent dancing and singing. Great shit.
After the Hololive ID concert Anime NYC was basically over, with only a half hour left, most people just strolled the main hall to check for last minute buys and or just do more cosplay photos and such. Others just left early trying to beat the rush. Just before exiting, this mad lad nigga is wearing head to toe ahegao drip lololol mad lad indeed. I mean, this is probably the only time you would be able your drip in public, might as well use it.
After going back to my hotel and dropping off my final buys of the day and cleaning up I headed out to have my final eats in NYC. First stop is White Caste lololol. I mean, I never had White Castle before but because of the Harold and Kumar movie from back in the day, I always wanted to try it out. Now that I see one near Times Square why the hell not lol.
The menu at the much rare White Castle burger sliders. Their original burger slider is only $1.20, the kind of pricing that reminds me of dollars value menu from like 5-6 years ago. Wow. If they cost $1.20 now, that means one might have cost like 80 cents 5 years ago or less wow. They have a whole bunch of other options and varitions with cheese and other toppings that significantly increases the price however.
It should be noted that the guy taking my order totally didn’t give a shit and felt like he was gonna die or quit any day now. I waited a fair bit longer than I expected, mainly because I ordered 3 separate kinds of sliders while most people just get a combo that’s like a duplicate of 4 or so of the same kind. I ordered an original that has no cheese but just pickles and onions, a cheese one and one they call 1921 slider that has also lettuce, tomatoes and a thicker patty compared to the other two, which I can only assume is based on how White Castle made their burger sliders before cost-cutting and etc back in the day. My honest thoughts? They are kind of shit lol. I mean, they are ghetto burger sliders, what do you expect, the entire reason why Harold and Kumar went to White Castle is because it’s not something one ever feels that they want to eat on any frequency, it’s inherently kind of ghetto and I suppose that’s why Harold and Kumar craved it, they just felt like it after all the shit they been through at the start of their movie. Do I feel inspired however? Not really, just hungry for better burgers and more food. I no joke could probably eat 10 of these and only begin to start to feel full. They have a combo for that actually lol. Next.
I end today’s sporadic dinner venture with Los Tacos No.1, the famous Taco joint franchise in New York that lots of people say is really good shit. Based on the amount of people lining up and eating here I think they are on to something.
Geographically located very close to broadway, alot of the customers are folks just coming out from watching shows and you can kinda tell that they are tourists as well. As for taco options they have 4 main kinda, which can be summed up as beef, chicken pork and lastly cactus. I order the first three, not really feeling to try cactus taco anytime soon today tho.
You have a choice of either corn or flour tortilla and I choose corn as it was meant to be. You can also customize each one when they prepare your order if you don’t want the onion, cilantro, salsa or guac and in the case of the pork, pineapple cucumber. I just asked for everything, even though I’m not a particular fan of cilantro. Overall they are pretty good tacos, considerably better than the ones I’ve had in Toronto that’s for sure but not as good as the ones in LA I had last year where they double wrap the tortilla. I mean, if your feeling like tacos in new york, this place is probably one of the best and most famous with multiple locations across Manhattan area meaning it’s pretty damn popular. It should also be noted that all the people working at this place were Mexican and spoke not the cleanest English, so that means they get bonus real points.
One final series of selfies at Times Square before I go back and do some bait ass souvenir shopping.
After eating my tacos I was good, but not truly full and thought about going to Joe’s Pizza, you know the one that was featured in Toby Maguire’s Spider man movies. When I walked by the line was out the door and wrapped to the next intersection corner, yea not this time. Similarly all dollar pizza places in the area also had lines out the door for some reason, maybe this is all the Anime NYC people? Either way I gave up and instead I went into this random bakery/dessert place to mix things up for something sweet for once.
The bait thing one would do is have a slice of NYC cheesecake. They did have it in individual slices but it didn’t have strawberry red shit on top so I passed on it. Too plain. While walking through Times Square someone was blasting that “New York” song, the one that was featured at the end of Men in Black III i think. That song reminded me in that movie K liked pie, like apple pie and shit so I decided to get an apple pie. Cause you know, I’m in the Big Apple after all.
Taken back to my hotel, I open up the mini pie and give it a taste. So then, how was it? I cannot lie. I cannot hide it. I am Asian. It was too sweet. Fuck. Just far too sweet. It was like I was eating apple jam with extra sugar mixed into it so that i can get thicker and turn into Carmel when heated. Man. But I didn’t care, it wasn’t the pie, it was me for being too Asian and not having blown out non-sensitive white people or black people taste buds that find this shit normal or just right. Regardless, I ate that shit. I needed to drink all of the water in my water bottle to finish this pie, and my water bottle is pretty big, I just refilled it when I got back to the hotel lobby.
Maybe I should have gotten the cheesecake instead. Shit. Ahwell..
As I write this I just finished packing up my merch and goods and weighted my luggage; under the weight limit by like 10 pounds, noice. I got a taxi cab booked ready to get me to the airport tomorrow morning via the hotel so I’m ready to go. Things should be ok I hope.
Maybe I’ll have Shake Shack at the airport if I see it to help me wash down the memories of that White Castle and Apple Pie.