A story blog by Dana Marton: The Reluctant Concubine

Dana Marton's The Reluctant Concubine is good fantasy romance about a girl who is a healer but is taken from her people in order to become a slave. Don't let the title fool you.

She's following in the footsteps of Ilona Andrew's Clean Sweeps and Grace Draven, blogging her chapters until the book is done and taking it off the blog after. Like I do too!!!

She updates it 2 chapters a day. Marvelous. It's the first thing I check every morning!!!.

Recipe: Dessert: Soft Crepes

Should've made a better presentation of the goods but couldn't 'cause I was too hungry and the ice cream was melting. XD

Made this a couple of days ago for my sisters. It's already good without any filling, my sisters ate just as is but I prefer to eat it with ice cream.

Portion: 18-20

Ingredients

1. 4 eggs

2. 1/2 cup butter, melted

3. 1/3 sugar

4. 1 cup flour

5. 1 cup milk

6. 1/4 cup water

7. 1 tsp vanilla

8. dash of salt

Direction:

1. Mix all ingredients in blender except flour. Blend. Sprinkle in flour, blend. Refrigerate for 1 hour.

2. Remove and blend for about a minute. Heat 8 inch skillet. Butter pan 1/2 tsp. 

3. Pour 1/4 cup of batter, thin layer. 

4. Cook for about 30 seconds/ or until edges lifted easy by spatula. flip. Cook again. 

5. Use wax paper between crepes. (Although, maybe because I used too much butter for the pan, the wax paper was unnecessary because the crepes didn't stick together)

Super duper yummy and easy to make!!!

Movies, Friends and chats

Due to an unexpected possible opportunity that came my way, my friends and I ended up talking about every wrong thing about Indonesian movies that I realized the only time I actually watched an Indonesian movie was when it was free, as in somebody actually paid for me to watch the movie. Here's the thing, it's not that we don't have good domestic movies, we do, but I don't personally feel justified in paying money for it because most of our movies are usually stupid horror movies or romance. I don't even watch Hollywood's romance in theaters, waste of money and time. I'd much prefer to watch it alone in my house and also be able to speed through it when I get bored.


You might ask, what DO I watch in theaters? Action movies. I would readily shell out money to watch things explode and people getting killed (but not animals), why? Because then we get the whole cinematic experience when watching action movies from sound to camerawork to cinematography. It's a full ride!


Anyway, we started listing the Indonesian movies that we've actually watched and my friend mentioned, "Kapan Kawin" is funny. Kapan kawin in English is "when are you getting married?' yes, it is that question that drives us singletons nutty.


I've heard about the movie but I don't know what it's about and I was like, "Is it about a girl/boy who gets harassed by people via that question, finally snaps and kills everybody afterwards?"


Friend: I like your version better.


Another friend: It can start as a comedy...then becomes a thriller. A thriller comedy!


Suffice to say, all three of us are unmarried....but if that was the movie, I'd watch it though.

Found a favorite Youtuber!

I love youtube, not just for music but for the collections of really interesting vloggers, like:

These brothers are nerdy, entertaining and intelligent as hell. John Green is a writer and Hank Green is a musician and an awesome human being. Both of them are. 

I also love their crashcoarses vids, explaining things from science, history, current events, literature in an entertaining and easy to understand way. 

And there is 

Basically, they share current events and joke about it no matter what it is. It can be crass at times but they are comedians, it's what they do. They do discuss issues in a round table way that I like and they are also very thoughtful.

And then there's

EmergencyAwesome is a vlog that discusses TV shows that's currently on air. 

and 

A movie reviewer, there's a lot of them on youtube but I like him because his taste ran toward action and fantasy. And I usually agree with his reviews. 

and now I found

This guy is so funny and so intelligent. I love his vlogs. I'm still catching up on his videos but so far, so good. He vlogs about current events, about music, about education, science (he has a degree in physics) and his vlogs are well researched and hella funny and thoughtful and inspired. I love it. 

I still have a lot of vloggers that I subscribed too but these are my go-to vlogs. 

BOO IS MISSING. HE DIDN'T COME HOME LAST NIGHT.

So, all right. I probably shouldn't panic. Cats do this all the time, my other cats do, but you don't understand, Boo follows me around all day and always come when I call. 

Last night he didn't come back. 

I'm worried he's out there sick or something. 

I had him since he was a baby and some really bad people put him inside a plastic bag and threw him in my back yard along with his sister. His sister didn't make it, they were wet and probably cold. 

Boo would be with me for a year next March. 

HURRY BACK, BOO. 

TV Series: The 100

So, I've been catching up on The 100, the TV series based on the book by Kass Morgan.

At first, I watched a few episodes and it was good and dark but it didn't really get me, though I do like the characters: Bellamy the guy who would sacrificed everything for his sister, Octavia. Clarke, the logical and sensible girl who has a really good head on her shoulders and was on point on their mission. Then there was Octavia herself, the girl who was raised under the floor because there was a one-child limit in the Ark, the space ship they were on. 

After a few episodes, I dropped the series and continued to greener and much more exciting pastures. 

Then season 2 happened, and of course because of tumblr, I would start getting gifs of scenes that made me curious, so I started on it again. And holy shit, it got better. 

But first, let's start from the basics. 

There was a nuclear war or something like it and the Earth got so destroyed we had to escape to space. We built spaceships and then combined all of them, we named it the Ark, appropriate no? We intended to wait out the radiation to disappear from Earth so we could live in it again. 

But as the years go buy, the resources that we earlier had and the spaceship itself began to crumble away, little by little. Food, even air. We start to punish people over the smallest things to enforce order, also to have a reason to throw people in the airlock so the air would last longer. 

The ark could no longer sustain our numbers, so the council decided to send people down to Earth, to asses whether Earth is livable or not. Who do they send? 100 of their juvenile delinquents. They are equipped with bracelets to judge their health and detect their heartbeats. 

To make a long story short: they landed on Earth, then fought on who would be in charge: Bellamy representing anarchy, and Clarke representing order and mission. 

They fight, they explore--

--they found out they're not alone. 

Grounders, people who had been living there, a warrior-rich culture. Reapers, people who eat other people. The Mountain Men, the people who were survivors of the nuclear war and had been living in bunkers among old riches and luxury. 

One of the quotes that describe the series are, "Who we have to be to survive, is not who we are". 

This series is dark! I'm not kidding. The choices these kids had to make again and again. The things they had to do was hard and soul-corroding. There's no black and white, and sometimes they are only black and white. It's always the extremes and never middle-ground. 

There was a scene where Bellamy had to kill his friend that was hit by yellow fog (the acid fog), he was burned and in pain and past saving, but Bellamy, who had been encouraging anarchy, violence and a no-rules community couldn't do it. Instead it is Clarke, who took the knife from Bellamy's hand, hummed and brushed this dying boy's head and pierced his carotid artery, giving him a merciful death. I was HOLY SHIT, I did not expect that. I did not expect for Clarke, who has been the one who preached order and logic, to do such a thing. We see that echo of our surprise in Bellamy's face, and the respect to go with it.

This is where I turned believer for these series. 

There was also a gruesome scene where murder happened, and this one guy (who has been a violent asshole the whole time) was accused and they formed a lynch mob. But it wasn't her, it was actually a little girl, who killed the teenage boy because her father was killed by his. She ended up chased by Murphy (the one who almost got lynched) but ended up jumping to her death. 

The writing of this series has been amazing. Every character has that perfect line, have a purpose to jumpstart the story. The characterization itself is layered and rich, not one character is just one thing, even those that we would love to hate; we understand them, and there is at least one thing from them that we admire. 

Also, I LOVE that this show is riddled with kickass females. From Clarke who emerged to be a good leader for her people: who learns to make and live with the hard choices, to both be soft and strong. Who earned the respect of her people by being a good leader which is not as easy as you might think.

Octavia who felt like she never belonged anywhere until she met Lincoln, who taught her the way of the Grounders and grew to be this awesome warrior. And I love that Lincoln respects that strength in her. It showed that when Bellamy said, 'You're good for her. You make her strong." And Lincoln said, "She was always strong."

There is Anya and later Lexa, the commander for her people and Indra, a warrior and head of her village.

Out of every one of these characters there is something that we could respect. And I LOVE these characters despite that I do not always understand their choices. 

And the relationships, the bromances, and the romances and the familial are written is such an intricate and human way that it is just SO GOOD.

I just...have so much LOVE for this show. 

Dreamwalkers: Dreamwalkers chapter 4

Dreamwalkers: Dreamwalkers chapter 4: Okay, last chapter was a false start, figured out I had to change a few chapters in order to fit the mythology. This is #day1 of the #30day...