nobuta wo produce, a highly pooular school life japanese drama which originated from a book, was aired in the year 2005. and up till this date, it is still considered one of the best dramas by some. well, i didnt read the book, so i don't know about the difference.

anyway, this post is partly about the drama, and mostly like all the other random posts that i wrote.

just a short introduction, nobuta wo produce is about a girl, nobuko, who always got bullied. 2 guys, 1 of them a weirdo and another the most popular guy in school, could not take it and decided to make her popular. the series showed how they make nobuko (nobuta is her nickname) into a highly popular person from a person no one wants to have anything to do with.

i guess, one reason why nobuta struck at the hearts of many people, and why it was so captivating, was because it was the ideal life most of us want. the most important thing in the drama that was highlighted subtlely over and over again (don't worry they did it so subtlely you won't get sick of it) was the strength of the bonds of the 3 friends.

friendship. most of us have friends. some have more, some have lesser. just that, our surface friends, our normal friends, our close friends, probably even our best friends, may not even match up to that kind of level as shown in the drama.

the drama shows the many kind of realistic and practical (although to some extent there were some exaggerations) situations which all of us would face (though it might not be all of them) at one point of time or another.

being misunderstood by people, being disliked by people, being sabotaged by people, having no one to trust you, realizing that your friend betrayed you, having unreciprocated love, thinking about the future... etc. these are all situations which most of us are familiar with.

yet, our lives seemed so boring. because not many of us really went all out to try the various things. not all of us went out to make wonderful memories. not all of us dared to try something new. most of us, just passed through the motion, following the crowd, and doing the same things over and over again. even if we went out and played and tried different things, it still seemed somehow the same. because the experiences in the drama, are so special that it is nearly impossible to get that kind of life in real life.

like i said just now, the drama was about friendship too, which i believe is the main theme of the story. friends that will believe you even when the whole world doesn't. friends that will sacrifice their own important things to help you. friends that care for you even when no one else does. friends who understand your feeling without you having to say anything. friends that are always with you.

granted most of us have friends who would do that. and i do have friends like that too. i have friends i know will believe me, i have friends who understand me very well to the extent i could not lie (hahahhaha), friends who care for me and would give up certain things for me. but for some obscure reason which up till now i cannot identify, there is just some difference between their level and my level, which is also the level most of us are at. and it is because of the level difference which attracts me to it so much. as if, i want to find the factor that would raise my level.

and every episode of the drama, in a way, teaches you something. not giving up, cherishing yourself, believing in your friends, having fun, planning for the future, sacrifice, unfulfilled dreams, separation... i find that every episode also contains some lesson which we all can learn from. yet of course, knowing and applying it in real life are totally 2 different things.

in a way, most of us really really want our lives to be like that. humans are meant for companionship, and even though there are some of us who avoided others and have little to do with anybody, it doesn't mean that we do not desire that kind of thing, i think.

how do i end this? i wanted to end it in a cool way, but all of a sudden, when i saw how the drama situations somehow describes my life now, i can't think of any cool way to conclude. so well, it is an old drama. if you watched it, watch it again. if not, go watch it.

what an uncool conclusion to this post.

some of you may have already known the latest advertisement of hell pizza to hit the net. the interactive zombie game where you 'role-play' as a pizza delivery man whose mission is to deliver a pizza safely across streets filled with zombies.

it is one of the best advertisements i had seen so far, being funny and in a way captivating, making me watch it till the very end and purposely dying to get all endings (my habit from playing visual novels, always go for all the endings). yeapx, this is like a live-action visual novel where you make choices, don't read but instead look at 'drama'.

so click on the video, and be on your way to deliver a pizza.

as most of us manga fans who are not the least bit proficient in japanese know, onemanga is the place for us to go to for our reading. it is like a collection center of the manga scanlations. from the more famous bleach and naruto to the lesser known like liar game (which is one of my favorite), most of us go there for the latest updates at least once or twice a week.

and of course, manga readers like me do not only read one manga. we read several at once. for me, i read bleach, naruto, liar game, history's strongest disciple kenichi, claymore, liar game, fairytale, fullmetal alchemist (which had just finished recently. great ending.), rosario to vampire 2...etc. as you can see, the site is very convenient for us, and naturally it requires a lot of work for the administrators or the moderators of the site to upload them.

but of course, this doesn't really go well with the mangakas, as readers like us will stop buying the manga and read online instead. from their perspective i can understand their feelings, since i write stories myself too. but from our perspective we just want to read.

well so onemanga decided to shut down, or at least take down all the manga. the forums will still be active though. which means from today onwards we need to go to different places to read our manga, which is very inconvenient. haix.

oh well, as they say all good things must come to an end. and from now on we have to search for various sources to read our manga now. reading will be a little bit more tedious.

so well, thank you to all the people who made onemanga works. you guys rocks.