Let’s start the first full day off of AnimeNYC bright and early as usual. We have most of our goals and missions for merch done yesterday which is great but there is still a few more left to do and the Hololive Super Karaoke Party at the end of the day so let’s see how things go.

Bright and early today for some breakfast, looks like the rain has stopped and is slowly drying up good shit.

Going the right way it seems.

But for us we do a detour for some nice smoked salmon and bagels, Russ and Daughters, which while touristy has become something of a tradition.

Still haven’t tried any of their other types, as the default smoked salmon and bagel cream cheese defaults to the Gaspe Nova, one day maybe I’ll have something different.

One day maybe one day.

I’d like to think that the majority of the visitors this morning are going to the convention but I think some are just straight up regulars and or tourists too.

We both got the usual bagel and lox but also decided to get some latkas too, potatoe fried things which is basically like hashbrowns.

Looking alright, comes with sour cream and apple sauce, which is a bit different than normal I think. Overall good but nothing special, even with the two sauces. I honestly can’t remember how much this cost but my guess is probably between $7-10 dollars.

The said bagel and lox sandwich with scallion cream cheese spread. Good shit, my sister liked it as this was probably the most recommend combo although I did say that their best part is the filling, the salmon and stuff inside, not the bagel itself, which she agrees with however.

The Javits center is such a great looking building and convention space, both from the outside and inside.

Nice Nice Nature cosplayer on her way in. There is a significant amount of uma mususame cosplayers around which is great it’s still popular as ever.

Waiting to get in, the usual.

Proof of existence, waiting to get in as per usual.

At like 10:15am they open the doors and we are allowed in. I never get tired of going through this way and view.

First things first, gotta pick up our wrist band for the hololive kararoke party. For my sister, she won a ‘free’ autograph lottery for the artist of Fubuki, Nagishiro Mito prior the con, which is technically via AnimeNYC itself, not J18 as you can just buy his books at their booth and get them signed. There is more to this story later but yea this is a prelude to that.

I got the wristband but the women who put it on me put is super tight, like what the hell is this shit, it was super uncomfortable and I ended up just go straight to her and saying can you put a new one on, this shit is way too tight, it’s almost restricting my blood. She was like ok, sure, sorry for putting it on so tight, she was concerned of it slipping off. Bitch, can’t you see I have fat arms? That’s the least of my worries.

With wristbands in order, gotta Happi up since we are inside now, good shit.

We failed to get the nice arknights Enfield bag yesterday so we tried again. Got line capped again fuck why man, so dumb.

Silence Suzuka is like, I have no idea why I am here or what this game is, but I want one of those bags because they are so nice and round. Same, I am sure many people are just like this, including ourselves.

Unable to precamp, decided to go back to the Holo booth to see what’s up, nothing much really, just the workers handing out new stamp rally cards and the usual.

Decided to line up and try to get some freebie stuff at the Friskees booth. So we wait.

For some reason which I am unsure about, but teto, a vocaloid similar to miku which was also released back in her time has become very popular again which is a bit strange. Perhaps there was a new song or something that brought her resurgence but it’s really a mystery to me. Lots of art and cosplayers of her, I have no idea.

Apparently for the Friskees booth you can download and app or go to some site and upload photos of your cat and you can print out magic like TCG trading cards of them with their face on it. Wow, kinda cool. Hence the line up, all cat lovers I guess.

These two bros just coming out of the Endfield line for the bag, they were like, yea I don’t play but I just want this bag, it’s so nice. Samee.

After a longer wait than usual we get to the kiosks to enter a number/letter code you get after uploading photos of your cat. You were supposed to download the app and do some other shit but for some reason it was not allowed for us because were are from Canada it seemed? Blocked in the Apple/Good store for us, strange.

After you enter your code you are presented with a bunch of templates and options in which you can give your card magic card like frame and skills.

Once you finish you have to wait a bit for the card to print. So wait, once it’s ready this guy gives you the cards and some other free cat shit.

I did it aswell as my sister sent me photos of Brad, the family cat and the yield from this freebie giveway is incredible. Not only do they give you a card of your cat, they have it double sleeved for you and give you a blind box filled with a cat keychaim charm and other goodies, and two cans of cat food and some treats. Wow holy shit, this is all free. Damn good farming potential maybe.

Holo booth kinda empty as there is no panels/events going on now, but there will be later.

They have another booth for non-enfield merch of yostar games such as Azurlane and OG Arknights, which is cool. I brought something later in the day from them.

Wow nice chibi costume and cosplay of the actual character from the game Percila I think, which is like the Mash/main girl in the story if you are a the main character. We didn’t know it at the time but taking a photo of this or other cosplayers around the booth and sharing it would be part of the task to get free shit from this booth, like the bag. When we did find that it, it was easy to do since we already had a photo to share for social media, jokes ez.

So close yet so far. We tried to jump ahead of the since the line guy said you can try just asking for the bag but in the end we were denied, got sent back to line to do the whole stamp rally thing, which fortunately was just at the booth itself, not like the holo one which had you buy merch from affiliate stores/partners.

The first thing to do was just like their twitter page, get these things, which are cool. You get the bag first thing too, which is nice but still takes so long.

You have to play ball for like 30 seconds and get as many in as possible just for jokes. It’s dumb but part of the ritual.

The stamp rally card which is not really a stamp rally but just a closed space activity ritual you have to do to get max free shit. Annoying but yea.

Ball is by far the clear bottle neck in the line, 30 seconds is way to long, should be like 15 seconds honestly. When it was my turn to ball I was absolutely horrible lol. Got only 19 plush ball animals in 30 seconds lol. Guy is like, nice effort fuck man lol. I saw some people get like over 30 hoops in their times, some even more since there was multiple balls, not just 1 to hoop with. My sister said some guys didn’t even want the free shit, they just wanted to ball for fun, damn lol. After this the last task was go to a PC and just play arknights enfield demo game for battle example or if you already play, just show the game/account then collect your stamp/prizes later. You are supposed to play for like 5 minutes on pc to beat the demo battle boss, but when I tried, you can do that shit in 20 seconds or less I think lol what the fuck? In the end we did get all the free shit but there was a gacha element at the end, they apparently just ran out of most of the gacha prizes so ya too bad, we were able to get like 1 of the 3/4 types but after that all ran out. My sister pulled for fun and apparently won the best prize a metal engraved mug but too bad, it’s all out anyways so whatever. Shit man, ahwell.

Back at the hololive booth people were starting to gather for the next event, Ina and Cecilla starting soon.

They are ‘rivals’ so they played some draing games and shit, it was pretty jokes.

Starting a drawing situation and the other person has to finish it. In the end it was all in good fun. Jokes outcome.

After that they brought a mic and invited people in the crowd to play other games together like rock paper scissors or thumb wrestling to determine what it means to be a rival.

It’s always fun for audience engagement but yea, it still kinda became a QA session with one guy asking “Can I beak down for you guys?” And he then cleared the around around him and the mic and broke dance, lol fucking jokes mad lad.

They showed in our view what they were seeing of the con/panel floor, which is where the camera is mounted on the booth, they can change it and zoom in/pan out, it’s pretty cool.

The panel/event ended with them asking everyone to turn around and take a photo, same as yesterdays event. I normally almost never end up appearing in these photos but today I was lucky. From this imaged that was posted on the hololive twitter account some time later, I am clearly visible on the left side, lol nice. My sister would have been there too but she left early to do the autograph with Mito, ahwell.

Once the booth panel ended everyone dispersed. Luckily I saw this hololive Marine cosplayer, pretty good shit, got a photo, noice.

As my sister was waiting for autograph I wandered around the area for exhibt industry area. Looks like Nikke here has some decent merch, cool.

This key art for the card game for Advent/Justice is so good. I am glad they used it for the panel.

Phase connect also had a booth to sell merch here too but little else other than a tv and a camera for some of their talents to occasionally go on to talk to fans on the con floor. It was super super dead, to the point it was kinda sad. I mean, compared to the size and popularity that holo brings, i almost felt sorry for them. They brought all this merch but noone really cares or was buying it, sad, the workers just chilling and waiting for customers.

Nice fox shrine maiden girl, I am pretty sure there was a show about this at I think, I forgot.

Seems like they change the cosplayers for the stamp rally from time to time aswell, noice.

This prize miku is so good, better than alot of scale figures even made today but shops are massively overpricing it for what it’s worth above retail. I asked and shop guy is like you can buy it for like $75 and i’m like, no thanks, maybe another day. I mean, I don’t think it’s worth that much, especically if USD. Pass, for now but might end up buying this one day, when it’s cheaper, below sub $50 CAD maybe. It’s incredible for a prize figure however, which is why they trying to up sell it greatly.

Sempai squad here. I still don’t fully understand what their business is? Car shit and organizing events/parties. Today they just seem like a normal artist/merch vendor, a bit confusing.

Waifu Cups here aka Gamer sups here with some new samples and test flavors. Not bad. I tried some of their ship, pretty good tasting really. Maybe I will be some maybe.

While the blue one was good, this red one was great, tasted like cherry or berries I think which I like.

Vtuber shylily is one of their main collabs/talents which they work with so it’s understandable they have a full wall art dedicated to her.

Not that fancy or any events but Genshin merch is here to sell, still busy tho, which is always good.

Around this time my sister came back by now with her autograph and a story of confusion to tell, which is kinda bad for animeNYC. She won Mito’s autograph through lottery prior to the con and was expecting the ability to sign anything but Mito’s party was like, no people have buy his book or have him sign only official holo work/art that has Fubuki on it or characters he has designed. This was not part of the original understanding between animeNYC organizers and J18, the autograph was supposed to be free, but I guess it wasn’t. She said the animeNYC organizers were like damn, we fucked up, what was the point of the lottery then if you can just buy the dudes autograph straight up from the J18 booth? It was absolutely pointless now since no matter what it required purchase of his books. My sister and many others were annoyed since many already brought his books yesterday and had them signed, such as myself but Mito/J18 refused to let people sign anything unless they had proof of purchase, which is kinda fucked up because, most people had no idea about this change/miscommunication and left their books at home/hotel. In the end she had to show the photo I took/she took of the books I brought yesterday and in some kind of middle ground they agreed that if someone already brought his books and had them autographed and had also won a lottery they can have one of his postcards signed, that’s it. That or official merch, nothing else, what the fuck lol. Man, the miscommunication and fuck up was unfolding in plain sight in the open and it’s pretty bad. Hopefully vendors/animeNYC planners learn from this fuckup, what a waste of time. This here above is the autograph postcard, hardly worth it considering what was promised of being ‘free’ lottery. Bullshit.

Back to the holo booth now, I had been waiting in line prior to this to get more free shit from the Friskees booth, cause my sister said she wanted more trading magic cards and free shit. I mean, I can’t blame here it’s really great free shit. But anyhow once that Friskees freebie run was done, waiting for like another half hour it was time for the next holo event panel at the booth, a fuwamoco event basically trying to get people to play the new hololive dreams game, which already people were lol. They presented it using a battle between the twins in a way to showcase the kinds of gameplay the game has.

While watching/some random guy came up to my sister and was like, here have this, seeing as she was wearing the biboo happi, assumed automatic fan hence gave away some 3d printed pebbles, the mascot for fans of biboo. It was pretty good and said I was her fan too, I mean, I am since I subscribe to her channel and watch all of her streams. I don’t know bout the quality of these things but the thought helps for fans. I suppose even in the hololive sphere there are some fans who like to give and do ‘pixe dust’ kind of things, hmm.

The panel/event started and they had the camera going already which is always nice.

Three games to rule them all, all within hololive dreams mobile game.

The core main game, the music game they battled each other, it was jokes because the speed was so slow. They played total of two songs chosen by fans/curation by them which were there Bau-dol song and snow Halation, the iconic love love song which is still a favorite for idol music to this day.

In the end, mocomoco won this round, but at what cost, they were both playing at such slow speeds it was kinda painful to watch, but good show.

The next game was the jump rope game and the third, some card game that I haven’t unlocked yet. My sister says that there is even more mini games within this game and this card so yea, that’s a thing.

Once again they did a photo for everyone at the booth and I think we had a pretty good chance of being in them, gotta check up their twitter posts later on.

In the end, Mococo won, noice, all in good fun goo shit.

I went to the washroom I think during this time/rest and my sister went off to do another mini journey Go back to Goodsmile maid indie vtuber and collect these ribbons as gifts to her and her fans. Hmm, more pixie dust it seems.

Walked around a bit more and ended buying this official New Jersey azurlane standee on the left from official yostar booth, expensive but cool still.

So tired, standing for like 6-7 hours now took it’s toll, gotta eat something and find a place to rest in the food area.

Unlimited sugar water, sounds good but too much sugar man, not good.

Scoping out the nice japanese food in the area.

A drink place named after the shop in Persona 4, cool.

Decided to get some bento sets, very expensive tho, like $22 dollars each damn.

Gotta get some of those famous karls balls again. yep yep.

To think that in Japan a normal serving of takoyaki is like 500 yen. oh god shit is so expensive.

Our food was pretty solid, the bento I found was better than average, kinda room temp but it’s supposed to be that way anyway. But damn, this was so much money.

For some reason they had touhou cosplayers right beside the eating food area doing a photoshoot? What the lol?

Nice uma musuame haloween agnes digital cosplay in front of me while sitting eating.

But a question remains to me why were these guys doing this shit here in the food eating area? Were they not given a proper space in the upper exhibt hall? It’s so bizzare, perhaps this is a unofficial meet up but why in the food area I will never truly fully know.

Most of the cosplayers were dudes but a few were really good girls/women in dresses, very high quality, the duality of some cosplay communities and fandom I guess.

We began our afternoon doing the artist alley runs/some vendor booths because we didn’t’ even see any until now. Looks like noms and dokibird have a very nice booth here, no new real merch tho in terms of food shirts tho so too bad.

They do have some upcoming holostar merch collab which is always nice to see but not ready quite yet.

Pretty large collection of stuff we got here. Overwhelming actually.

This artist is famous now, for making some Mandani sticker and has gone viral as my sister says.

Ended up buying the Ram standee. The artist says I was the first one to buy one lol cool.

Still older art of graduated holo members remains which is kinda sad because you know some people will still buy it sad.

Buying some shit, forgot what that my sister saw and what tho.

Ended up buying a few prints, good shit. Pretty sure I brought from before. Good history lore.

Good art and the big oguri stand was open auction. Was going for $650 at this time.

Pretty good but not good enough for me.

Pretty good but not good enough for me even with the nice suisei art. Gotta be discriminating.

The not Noms artist Kamiki I believe which I have brought from before in the past.

Pins nice a familar, gotta pin them all.

Pokajan is a majoong like card game in Hololive dreams and this artist decided to make custom art decks for this. Sold out lol nice. They were also collecting the stamp rally holo fans open for trading which has become a thing for this con apparently, people wanting to trade for their oshi and or high profile members like any EN or Suisei/fubuki/any gen 3 etc.

They had some good shit but yea, that pokajan card set was their best stuff. Nice.

Nice art, I think saw this artist at EVO before, my sister brought a keychain from him now of Sol, cool.

Cool pins and unique shit.

Robocat, one of the artists I always buy from is here again. Ended up buying some more prints from him, even tho so expensive. While I was paying a Exhibitor friend came up to him and gave him a Luna hololive fan, the one you get for the stamp rally, friend was like, here, this is what you get for doing the stamp rally, or at least downloading the game. He was like are there any other members besides luna? I decided to comment that yes, there was and the pick is random, others are trying to trade for their oshi, it’s a thing now. You can technically farm them if you had unlimited badges but they stamp your con badge to prevent repeat visitors and farming, so doh. Everyone is the same, just here for Hololive basically.

Oh shit some nice fruit vessels with fruit juice, gotta get some of that nice kyoho juice.

We can’t resist juice and vessels, the gimmick is strong but It’s so good.

Expensive but worth it I think.

So worth, the juice is quite good, I think it’s actually fresh or mostly real kyoho juice wow.

Saber and friends beginning to roll out on a luggage, funny shit.

Nice ADO artist from anirevo also seen here. Nice goo shit.

Damn, here forever this pokemon guy, I swear, been around for like 15 years at least at every con.

Great holo art but gotta hold. Shit’s expensive, running out of cash for paper.

Also nice but gotta hold.

Real gacha machines again, I think japanese pure type in the corner.

Shit ain’t cheap as you can expect again.

Looks cool tho, reminds me of the real setup like in Japan with the stacked rows.

Decided to check out the upper pavillons to see what’s up.

Lots of black folk for some reason hmm.

By the time I got to this space event organizers were saying they were starting to close up hm.

I see, this was the “Black Cosplayer Meet up” not sure how I feel about this existing at all.

The con today in the main hall ends at 7pm and most people were on there way out. Like this nice fox cosplayer tails.

But for us it was time to line up for the Hololive kararoke party concert.

Gold ticket lets go, lime to line up and camp hoping for better seats, I mean gold is the highest tier already so only disabled can be higher or AnimeNYC+ enter first.

Just gotta wait now for an hour. The concert begins at 8pm. Nice man gura in front of us waiting too, still sad probably about Gura/Saba my guess.

Proof of show waiting holo existence Happi edition.

Almost time to go in, everyone stands up.

As as gold ticket we get a free postcard with the key art for this event. This is the first time we have seen this art lol. What the fuck, it would have been nice if they used this to help advertise the event more other than the logo they just had on the site. Kinda bad on AnimeNYC’s part.

Going in now.

Finding a seat is a bit rough but we find some for the gold area, not the best unfortunately but not the worst, ok.

Proof of seated existence.

Gonna start, no photos or recording in the live show, so yea.

And it’s over lol. Overall the show was great, it was just these 4 in the studio doing live sing alongs of popular songs both japanese and english with live 3d tracking. It was quite a different experience from the usual holo concerts I been to but I think this is kinda more fun and less formal. Not bad, wouldn’t mind going to another one of these in this kind of true live format.

Heading out, proof of show complete existence, very tired long day edition.

It’s always nice to have a clean exit without anyone else around the con at this hour.

This was always part of the plan, late night vitos pizza again, my go to post con pizza near hotel.

The man himself, alleged, Vito the owner. Whether or not his name actually is Vito has not been determined but I always remember him.

No frills but at the same time like double/triple the price compared to cheap dollar slices but worth it.

White pizza, siclian pep, margarita and grandma slice, each cut in half to share between my sister and myself. Good shit as always. My sister said the sicilian pep > white pizza > margarita > grandma. Ok, I like them all but for me it’s Margarita > sicilian pep > white > grandma. Would again and I have.

Overall it was a very successful day but I question some of the shit going on with animeNYC management and organizers. Like the autograph shit and late Japanese guests announcements to even late lottery ticket sending. Tomorrow is Sat, the most busy day so let’s see how that goes.