It's the end of the first day of OffKai, my second time attending.

I'm a little bummed out about how disorganized the event feels this year. It's clear that there's more space all around, for artist alley, exhibitors, board games, arcade, etc. However, the lines are significantly longer, everything seems louder, and everything is more spread out.

The event is split between two venues, the north hall and the south hall, so there's a lot of walking back and forth between them. Registration was a little less chaotic than last year, though definitely still chaotic since there's only one security gate at south hall for registration, board games, arcades, itashas (not sure if that's the right word, it's the cars with the anime wraps), and the gaming stage and you have to cut the registration line to get into the space.

And south hall is only open until 9 PM, which is a bummer since I enjoyed hanging out there at late hours last year (at least, I seem to remember the space being open pretty late last year -- or maybe that was a byproduct of the fact that if the space closed it was easy to relocate to just outside to space to keep playing) to wind down and chill with friends. Even if it were open later, the entire south hall is not very nice to be in as it's a large cacophonous space. It's easier to go back to north hall and find an empty table somewhere, where it's more quiet.

I also enjoyed yabai market, though I always feel a bit weird going there. I'm not much of a materialistic person. So, while I want to support the artists I like, I don't really want to have any physical items just to have them. I don't really need a NSFW poster to hang in my rooms and I'd rather have digital copies of books. I asked one publisher, J18, if they sold digital versions of their books that I could buy and they just replied that they are available for free on https://doujin.io/. I checked and it's just online-only webpages that you have to login to view. That's not really what I want, what a shame...

I went to way less talks this year than last. Guildhouse was empty in the middle of the day and super packed late in the evening. There's a bunch of live music events happening nearby and a Crossfit convention in the same building for some reason.