NYAF - Part 2 - Beginning of the First Day

Much delay is in tow due to my masochistic need remind myself how poorly the economy is doing and how I can't understand how a number of female friends can actually support Sarah Palin on sex alone.

NYAF Day 1-
The event begins at roughly 8 in the morning for staff, with Michelle Manning (the blue shirt supreme) arriving on site around 7:30. A crowd forms outside of the Javitz Center. Or at least I assume this is the case, as I can't be bothered to leave my dorm until around 1. I take a cab over the Center in costume: Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid 1, and head down to the lower levels of the northern block of the center, where the main exhibition hall and all panel rooms (panels, for those who've never been to any kind of convention, are side discussion rooms where a person or group of people will discuss a specific topic. For anime cons, this varies from "What being in Japan is like" to "Dubbing your own poronographic anime") sprawl before me. This is the life that caused the empty darkness of the day before to chill me so deeply.
My first stop was the Bandai booth, where several friends were participating as costumed spokespeople for one of Bandai's recent acquisitions: the insurmountably popular Gainex series Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. After wandering the convention floor, acquiring food and getting another of my friends into costume for Bandai, the booth transforms from mere company Wizard-of-Oz-Esq talking head to a show. JJ Samp, a Nia cosplayer from the Gurren Lagann series, leads a trivia contest with other cosplayers from the series as contestants, all of whom do their best to act and answer questions in character. This is followed by a short skit Samp and her friends wrote. As the "day" (airquotes in reference to the fact that the main exhibition hall closed around 6, but panel and anime viewing rooms were still open for events until 9) neared is close, the Bandai booth decided to hand out its entire stock of series posters to fans for free. An onslaught of smells and flesh strike as a quivering mass of cat ears, yaoi paddles, chained animal collars and "kawaii desu-ne?" swarm the stage and my friends are almost immediately overwhelmed by the crowd as they scramble to put posters in hands and shoo fans away. The latter was grossly inhibited by the fact that Bandai had about 6 or 7 posters in their arsenal and wanted to deplete their stock for the entire weekend on day-1.
After changing into "blue shirt" mode, I was tasked with clearing out the convention exhibition hall. The con was slightly less crowded than last year, with far fewer company-sponsored booths making up the bulk of the space and more smaller retailer booths replacing them. The activity in the main exhibition hall was limited to a con photography company, the New York Jedi and the maid cafe. Most convention content was located in the panel/viewing area, where a small stage hosted tutorials and small shows and the rooms contained concerts from local and Japanese bands as well as the World Cosplay Summit masquerade.

The End of the First Day.