Code monkey like you

It started with Facebook. First, there was a post about Singapore’s PM Lee Hsien Loong talking about wanting to learn Haskell. Then, there was this lovely blog post by one of
Lux's colleagues - Lakshmi Kumaraswami (Does that make her another Lux?) - about her experiences with learning Python. Python is cool. So is Perl. Or Ruby. Over the course of the last few years, I've downloaded a variety of programming languages - swearing that I would spend the time getting to learn them, but never have gone beyond opening the documentation.Erlang. Nimrod. Haskell. Haxe. Clojure.

Maybe it's a nostalgia thing.

Maybe it's about the feeling of power you get. I downloaded a PDF of good old Kernighan and Ritchie. And started my way back up from "Hello, world".

It was like a kick in the nuts.

Like many bad programmers, I had an inflated opinion of my own programming skills. It would be a breeze, doing those old programs again, I thought.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

One of the exercise programs in the first chapter read: "Write a program to copy its input to its output, replacing each string of one or more blanks by a single blank"

I was fucked.

I was looking for ways to assign inputs to string objects and call replace() functions. string objects don't exist in K & R C.

Objects don't exist in C.

In the end, the solution is so simple. If the previous character is a space and the current character is a space, don't do anything. Otherwise, write the current character to the output.

I had to google it.

It wasn't just the code. Setting up the development environment required more thinking than I had done over the past four years combined. My office network administrator treats every user as one with the skills and the intentions of a Russian hacker, which means that I can't install anything that requires changes to the
registry. So I downloaded MinGW. Download, unzip and extract works better than an
installer. 

Then I wrote "Hello, world".

/*
* Most of what follows is probably humblebragging, about setting up an editor with
* C syntax support. 
*/


I thought, "I need syntax highlighting. Notepad doesn't cut it." 

The usual suspects - Textpad, Multiedit, Notepad++ - were either no longer free or
used installers. 

Then I thought of Scintilla. Scite was a nice and easy to use Notepad substitute, with syntax colouring support for every language I'd downloaded -plus several that I hadn't. 

Downloaded it, unpacked it and found there was no executable file. 

Opened the readme file and it began with

"Scintilla can be built by itself. To build SciTE, Scintilla must first be built."

I needed either a Visual C++ compiler (recommended). The readme also grudgingly informed me that TDM Mingw32 4.7.1 was also supported. 

Oh Good. I had MinGW.

I followed the instructions 

To build Scintilla, make in the scintilla/win32 directory

cd scintilla\win32
GCC:mingw32-make

Of course, the make failed. 

The compiler spat this message out and refused to proceed.

In file included from c:\mingw\lib\gcc\mingw32\4.8.1\include\c++\cmath:44:0,
from main.cpp:1:
c:\mingw\include\math.h: In function 'float hypotf(float, float)':
c:\mingw\include\math.h:635:30: error: '_hypot' was not declared in this scope
{ return (float)(_hypot (x, y)); }
^

Googled and found it was known issue with the MinGW compiler. Bug 2250, no less. 

The support guy's response was:

"I can guess that the problem is unwarranted occlusion of the
prototype for _hypot() in the presence of __STRICT_ANSI__,
while still exposing an inline function implementation which
requires it, but, as I say, I don't have time to pursue it at
present. The work-around is to add -D__NO_INLINE__ to the
compile time options, to hide the offending inline function
implementation."

That made as much sense to me as you can imagine.
But I latched on to the word "work-around" and figured that I needed to change the compiler options. 

Right. 

So where were the compiler options? 

I knew the GNU C++ compiler was gcc.exe. So I searched within the Scite folder for all files containing the words gcc. The search turned up a bunch of files - none of which seemed to fit. The only one that seemed to have any relevance was a file called scite.mak. 

Which began with the comment

# Make file for SciTE on Windows Visual C++ version.

But helpfully, it also contained this line

# The main makefile uses mingw32 gcc and may be more current than this file.

And yes, there was a file called makefile in the folder.

There was no use of the word "gcc" in it, but at some point, memory kicked in and I modified the CXXFLAGS to read  $(CFLAGS) -pedantic -fno-rtti  -D__NO_INLINE__

And what do you know, it worked.

And that was a rush. It was the equivalent of untying an irritating knot.

Any one who has pretensions of being a writer has only one thing on his or her minds. To connect. To move the reader. To make the reader feel. Making the reader think requires another set of skills altogether - something that's frankly beyond my ken.

And that's why writing code is such an experience. You can move an inanimate object. Say the right words, and the CPU will do anything you want. Say the wrong words, and the compiler will shit on you, until you get things right. And you're not home, even if your code compiles. A misplaced bracket, and the whole purpose of your program is lost.

Can you imagine how liberating that is? Here is a reader with rules! Here is a reader who gives you honest feedback. No more worrying about whether your friends 'like' the stuff you write - "ooh poor Nari, looking for approval again.  Let's like his post".
When you code, you either use le mot juste or you don't. And if you don't, your reader tells you where you've fucked up. To the line and the position in the line.

It's hard to explain to non-programmers the lure of programming. It shouldn't be. If you like writing, you should like coding. If you like reading, you should like

coding. If you like prose, you should like coding. If you like poetry, you should fucking love coding.

When I was in college - which is shorthand for "when I was young, innocent and romantic", I thought a great deal of poetry. And the best poet, to my mind, was Stephen Crane.

There's this poem by Crane called "A man said to the universe". It's just 24 words long, but it conveys so much. Crane would have been a great programmer, I think. He did so much with so little. And that's the glory of code. What you make of it is what you can make of a severely limited vocabulary - but that vocabulary is enough to send you to the moon and back.

Who, Who? Random thoughts on sci-fi

I first heard of Doctor Who in school. This was back in the 80s, when I had the reputation of being a 'great reader of books'. It was Woody who asked me if I'd read any Doctor Who.
I understood it was science fiction.
When I was in school I was 'literary'. Which meant I sucked at science. I envied the guys who found physics easy. And I always had a sneaking feeling that I wouldn't understand science fiction. When Star Trek came on Doordarshan, I avoided it, until Narendran told me it was great fun.
Narendran was one of the smartest guys in school - and this was the first time he'd made a recommendation that was outside, well, lessons.
I watched Star Trek. I liked it. I remember Amok Time - where Spock goes nutso, not just because of its Vulcan mating season, but because Kirk is alive. But still, I never went crazy. Never watched the show obsessively.
Any way, it was Sci-Fi. The Sci was a put off.
It took a long while to get over the block. It was Star Wars that helped me through. The effects. The Star Destroyer. "You can't win, Darth" (that scene cracks me up now, after all the mythmaking about a Darth being the embodiment of Sith power. So essentially, Obi Wan says, "You can't win, evil overlord!". Of course, you could go for the Rakata origins - but I don't think Palpatine would suffer another emperor when he was around.)

In the meantime, India has lost, badly, to Australia.

It was in 2006 when I really turned on to Who. I'd been travelling to England quite a bit and I'd caught The Girl in the Fireplace while on one of my trips. I knew David Tennant from the Goblet of Fire movie, and one of my co-workers said that I should check out the series - and that Christopher Eccleston was the better doctor.

This was early on in Tennant's tenure. It was the fourth episode in series 2 - and his fifth full episode if you take the Christmas episode. People were still pining for Eccleston, and the 10-Rose shippers were still few. (Oh God, how I hate the shippers). This was before Turn Left and The Waters of Mars and Blink, before Tennant was the gold standard in Doctors (who the fuck are Tom Baker or Jon Pertwee, anyway).

I think I torrented Rose.

It was - unexpected.

The impression I had of the doctor from The Girl in the Fireplace was a jumble. The scene shifted from the court of Louis XV in 18th century France to a spaceship in the far future. Rose and Mickey were mostly bystanders and seemed to be comic relief. There were definite moments of tension, of course. The clockwork robots taking over the court. The wait for the doctor. The badass moment where the mirror shatters and the doctors rides into court. But still, without context, it was confusing.

The thing about Doctor Who was, at some level, was the weight of mythology behind it. Every comic writer worth his salt - Grant Morrison! Dave Gibbons! Alan Moore!!! - had written for Doctor Who magazine. The fandom was legion. The royal family. Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins. Patrick Stewart and Stephen Fry. Peter Jackson. Matt Groening. Douglas Adams had actually written for it - and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was a recycled Doctor Who script. What else could Reg be but
a Time Lord, and what else could his his study be but a TARDIS?

You know that there are things you "like" before really experiencing them? You like them just based on peripherals, by things associated with them. If your favourite author becomes a gushing fanboy when talking about someone else, you want to check that person's stuff. If several people you like - across a variety of media - keep talking about the same writer or show or movie, the effect gets amplified.

But even so, seeking the book or show out takes a little push. It can be as simple as picking a book up in a library or store and flipping through the first few pages - and finding yourself thirty pages deep, reading. Or it can be sitting on a bed and flipping channels, jet lagged and tired, and watching something you've heard so much about come up on the screen.

Watching the first few minutes of Rose was comforting. Time and place, obviously London, the present day. Person - a shopgirl who gets up at 7:30 am, takes a bus to work, spends her lunch with her boyfriend, goes back afterwards, and goes through some kind of security check as she leaves.

And then the fun begins.

There's the basement, with ranks of half clothed mannequins standing silently around. There's Rose searching for Wilson (C.E.O, and it took me a while to figure out that it stood for Chief Electrical Officer) and then the door slams locked behind her - and the mannequins start moving.
Looking back, on rewatches, it isn't particularly scary, but when seeing it for the first time, it was creepy. The tension builds up, especially as the first auton starts moving slowly, jerkily and inexorably towards Rose.
We all know what happens next. Rose is backed up against the wall and someone grabs her hand and says "Run!"

And then there's the flight through the elevator and the exposition - the mannequins are made of living plastic, and they are controlled by a relay on the roof. And the Doctor - it is he, of course - has a bomb. He tells Rose to go back to her life of "beans on toast" and heads back into the shop ("Henriks" as per the signs, "Henricks" as per news reports) - then popping out for a minute for the introduction.
"I'm the doctor, by the way, What's your name?"
"Rose"
"Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life"

Eccleston was a surprise. No costume as such - just a functional leather jacket and a jersey. No ruffled shirt or scarlet lined cape - no crazy hat and ten-mile long scarf. Hair cut short, almost military. And the features. A big forehead. Big ears. A huge wedge of a nose. And that grin. That crazy-madman-having-the-time-of-his-life grin.

Series One was lovely. The Long Game isn't very good, Simon Pegg notwithstanding. The Dickens story was nice. There were the Slitheen in a particularly noisome two-parter. But that was all right - because immediately after that came one of the best fucking Doctor Who stories ever.

Dalek

Im not going to go into the sheer brilliance that the episode was. Suffice to say that now you understood how exactly those metal bins could be terrifying - and everyone involved - Rob Shearman, Joe Aherne and most of all Eccleston himself - really got to show you what exactly a Dalek could be.

The episode also introduced the Time War - and why the Doctor was the last of the Time Lords (YANA notwithstanding)

The relationship between the Doctor and Rose was well done too - initially, its clear that she thinks that she is a child - obviously, given their ages. A smart child, but a child. He's like the adult having fun, showing off to the kids. But they both mature, and by the time the Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways rolls around, the relationship has become sweeter - and more balanced.

From series one, the adventure continues, past Christmases and regenerations, past silent libraries and weeping angels and Martian waters, of 11th hour rescues and doctors' wives and cybermen and zygons and Masters.

In the end, Doctor Who is hardly science fiction.

Its just great fun.


And now, my re-watch begins.

Saying Goodbye to Terry Pratchett

So Terry is dead.

I was walking home when I saw the email. It was from Penguin Random House and it began “It is with immeasurable sadness that we announce that author Sir Terry Pratchett has died at the age of 66.”

I didn’t read any further then.

Terry is dead.

It’s funny. Sir Terry Pratchett wrote books a continent away, and he was my friend. He was Terry. Not pterry, though I know that story.

It was 2000. I was in Hyderabad, and I was tripping on Harry Potter. On the Potter newsgroups, I came upon a thread asking for recommendations for other fantasy authors. Terry’s Discworld novels were the most frequently mentioned. There were wizards, one poster said. And there was a University full of them. Another recommended that the books be read in chronological order, from The Colour Of Magic on.

I bought The Colour Of Magic at a shop in Secunderabad. It was near Kamat, if memory serves me well. I think it was the Book Selection Centre. The shopkeeper had a shelf full of Pratchetts, and I thought, “That’s good. If this series works out, there’s plenty of stuff for me to read.”

As it turns out, there wasn’t nearly enough, but that’s another story.

I read TCOM. I was … underwhelmed. I could see that it was a parody of existing fantasy literature – I caught the D & D references and that Hrun was obviously Conan. I’d heard of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, though I hadn’t read any Leiber. It was also obvious that Bel Shamharoth was Lovecraftian. But I hadn’t read any Anne McCaffrey and only knew of Stormbringer from Nethack. It seemed that the author was trying too hard.

It was still better than most other stuff I was reading then. I bought The Light Fantastic a couple of days later.

The book was better, but still not wow! Ymper Trymon was a satisfactory villain, and I was getting used to the idea of a cowardly hero. And I loved Cohen the Barbarian, especially the quote about the best things in life being “hot water, good dentishtry and and shoft lavatory paper”.

I liked Equal Rites even better. But it took me long time to realize that Pratchett’s books weren’t always funny – not in the Wodehouse sense, which was what I had been expecting at some level. There was serious trope deconstruction, which was always good for a laugh, provided you understood the trope existed. But there was always a kernel of commentary there – about people, about attitudes, and traditions and ideology. And it always made me stop and think.

Take Guards, Guards – this was still early on, when it’s Carrot who is the hero, and Vimes is still a secondary figure, not the determinator-asskicker he would become with the later books. But even here, there’s this: “Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no”

Or take the entirety of Small Gods, one of the finest meditations on faith I’ve ever read. “Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.” Or “Every five years someone was elected to be Tyrant, provided he could prove that he was honest, intelligent, sensible, and trustworthy. Immediately after he was elected, of course, it was obvious to everyone that he was a criminal madman and totally out of touch with the view of the ordinary philosopher in the street looking for a towel. And then five years later they elected another one just like him, and really it was amazing how intelligent people kept on making the same mistakes.”

Or this one:

““Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time”.

By the time I got to Small Gods, I was hooked.

It wasn’t that all of Pratchett’s books were equal. There was the early instalment weirdness – the Granny Weatherwax of Equal Rites is nowhere near the Granny Weatherwax in Carpe Jugulum.  Vimes in Guards Guards is very different from the His Grace Sir Samuel in Snuff, character development notwithstanding. I found Pyramids weak among the early books. Among the later books, I’m not a fan of Monstrous Regiment or Snuff. But dear God, there were so many fantastic books inbetween.

There was Night Watch, my personal favourite – along with another book that I will come to in a bit, which has this quote about people who want to change society:” People on the side of The People always ended up dissapointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.”

Since he’s gone now, there won’t be any more lines like this.

But Terry had Alzheimers. He was failing. He wanted to rid himself of his embuggerance by drinking a Brompton cocktail and “with Thomas Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with Death.”

He didn’t need the cocktail.

The other favourite book is Reaper Man, where Death comes to terms with his own mortality – while Windle Poons, Unseen University’s oldest wizard hasn’t died properly. After the adventure is over and Death is restored, he comes for Poons, who has been quite busy living in his un-life.

Poons and Death have a brief conversation.

Poons says “One lifetime isn’t enough”

Death says “OH, I DON’T KNOW. THAT WAS YOUR LIFE”

“And, with great relief, and general optimism, and a feeling that everything could have been much worse, Windle Poons died”

I can see something similar playing out when Death came for Terry earlier today.

He was always angry. His best characters were angry. His characters were at their best when they were angry.

I don’t want to say “I hope he has no more need for that anger”.

I will miss the anger.

I will miss him.

I will miss the fact that I don’t know what the patrician will do to get Moist Von Lipwig to sort out the problem of tax collection in Ankh Morpork.

I don’t know how Salacia Von Humpeding will shape up in the watch

I don’t know what Tiffany Aching will grow up to be

But it’s OK.

There’s enough stuff in his existing books to keep me happy for a long long time.

Finding Franklin

Every few months, I go on a Franklin's Tower listening binge. And since there are so many good versions of this song, I thought I'd try to list down some of the best.


Studio version
First time I heard this, I was stoned, nice and mellow, in Mapper's room. Blues for Allah was playing - and the cassette was slipped in when the first chew was being made. Most of Help/Slip was spent doing justice to the smokes, and by the time Franklin's came on, I was uniquely - receptive, shall we say?

Live

September 1, 1979, Holleder Memorial Stadium, Rochester
For a long time after I left IIM, I wasn't listening to much music. The internet was fantastic, but it was a time of discovery of other sites - and most of my time was spent using Altavista's image search and waiting for the photo features from Danni's hard drive to load. Then, one day, I attended one of those informal quizzes.  The guy conducting it played Terrapin station and made a reference to Leigh Hunt and asked for a connection. The only thing  I knew about Hunt was "Lo, Abou Ben Adhem's name led all the rest" And I didn't get any points for the Terrapin identification, because the whole Lady with a Fan segment was linked to Hunt's "The Glove and the Lion". Anyway, I went home, fired up my modem and went looking. This was in the pre-wikipedia days - even pre-google, where directories like Hotbot and Yahoo reigned supreme. Anyway, from there, I discovered that there were a number of sites that allowed you to download songs and sets - and one of them was GDLive.com. I'm not even sure if this is the version I downloaded - over several days and failed attempts - but I remember it was a concert from the seventies and that it was in Rochester. Anyway, here's this one, with a very satisfying mellow tightness to it.

March 30, 1990, Nassau Coliseum (Without a net version)

Another one from BITS. Here it's Brent Mydland's keyboards as much as Jerry's guitar that make the song. I really liked Without a net - and it was one of the first CDs I bought, trying to replicate the feel of listening to it one night in Pilani, sitting on the steps outside Macho's room in Mal - the last in the Pi wing. The notes would cascade out, complementing the light from a lone 40 watt lamp, the conversation would ebb and flow as we would look at the enchanter's cloak of the sky, velvety blue-black and spangled with stars like tiny silver sequins and let the music wash over us, washing us clean of the doubts and insecurities of young adulthood - for a little while, at least.

May 9, 1977, War Memorial, Buffalo

This one's a relatively recent discovery. No R & D done. This was when I had just started going to the gym - and I needed music to stop me from thinking how completely unfit I was - whether it was on the crosstrainer or the treadmill or wherever. I had a bar of fruitellas to keep the saliva in mouth and an IPod to stop me hearing myself pant. The in-gym music was mostly hip-hop - Akon's Right Now and Yankee Daddy's Gasolina and  a song which I always heard as "In the moonlight, all over India, We are the boss". It was a weird collection. To tune this out, I had Everybody wants to rule the world, a lot of OMD, Cale, Springsteen, Atho antha paravai, the Choral and other stuff. I also had this concert from 1977 - since it had a number of my favourite songs - Tennessee Jed, Big River, The Music Never Stopped, Bertha, Not Fade Away etc. But the Franklin's was always one of my favourites. I also knew exactly how long it was - and would measure how much breath I had left based on where I was in the song. Oh - and the bit at 5:11 was one of my favourites.

June 9, 1997, Winterland Arena
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner". In 1993-4, I was in IIM C and Kozhandai was in XL. He visited - either for some cultural thing - or just chumma. He brought with him a casette - it was, I think one of the green Meltrack C-90 tapes. On one side was the Jerry Garcia Band. On the other was this - Winterland 6 9 77. The whole thing just blew me away. Even with the cassette hiss and crackles, I knew I was listening to something special. Deal. The Music Never Stopped.  Estimated Prophet leading into St Stephen into Not Fade Away (fantastic) into Drums and back again into St Stephen. But the highlight was the fantastic Help/Slip/Franklin - especially with the high intensity ending and the orgasmic riff after "If you get confused, let the music play". I spent a long time trying to track it down - and when I did, it was every bit as good as when I heard first heard it.
Anyway - this is it. My favourite. And thanks, Ramki Muthukrishnan

And here's the whole concert

There are others, of course. Pembroke pines, off one of the early Dick's Picks

And this fantastic one from 1976, Alameida County Coliseum, the entire set is a thing of beauty.

On the Diablo hamster wheel

Just finished playing Reaper of Souls. So when I say "finished", I mean I finished the campaign as a Crusader - the new class that's part of the Diablo expansion, went into adventure mode, finished all the bounty missions for each act once and visited 5 Rifts.
Oh. I got through all this on expert difficulty.

For those who don't know much about Diablo - which is practically everybody I know, apart from two of my nephews - When you start playing the game, you can choose one of three difficulties. Normal, Hard and Expert. The you unlock the "Master" difficulty. Then, you are probably ready to play the game. Because after Master come the real difficulty spikes - levels Torment 1 to 6.

So expert difficulty is as kind of a misnomer. It stands for "at this level of difficulty, you probably know which buttons to press when, but you still haven't figured out which skill combinations do the most damage. Your gear is probably terrible, just a bit higher than 'disastrous' and 'abysmal'"


The game is divided into acts - the core game has 4, and the Reaper of Souls expansion adds a fifth.

 

I'm just throwing this in because of the sheer ridiculous amounts of awesome involved

The story is - well - there are demons, there are seven great evils, five of whom you already killed off in the previous game, and you take care of the two that remain, here. But due to a P2C2E, the titular baddie - who was killed once in the original Diablo and once again in Diablo 2 comes back and gets killed again. To get to him, you cut your way through hordes of monsters, elite monsters, unique and super unique monsters with a bunch of capabilities that range from the irritating to the deadly.
The demons, unsurprisingly, take their names from the usual sources. Since they kicked off the franchise by calling it Diablo - which is again a Spasnishification of the devil and comes from Diabolos - which is greek for The Daily Mail - sorry, its greek for slanderer, they're pretty much stuck with that. But the usual suspects are there from the Talmud - Lilith, Duriel - which is supposed to be Hebrew for "God is my home", Azmodal, Baal, Belial from the Lemegeton and Mephisto - either from Faust or from the 8th circle of D & D hell. And there are the angels - who either follow the "el" naming convention - Malthael, Tyrael, Auriel, Itharael or the Harry Potter curse convention - Imperius, Inarius, Cruciatus - oh wait - that one isn't there, so far.

But angels and demons are an aside. The original game defined the hack and slash genre, and since I'm playing this on the xbox, its now a button-mashfest.  You select a monster with the left trigger, and keep clicking 'A' to damage it. If you're feeling particularly adventurous, you can click 'Y', 'X' and 'B'. And squeeze right trigger while you're at it. And there are lots of monsters. Lots and lots of monsters.

Some mobs are even bigger - but thats how it looks. You can't even see your character

The key thing about the game, the thing that ensures your survival, is gear.
You have weapons and you have armour. Weapons and armour come in multiple categories. There's the normal stuff - which has one attribute: Armour for - well - armour, damage for weapons.

Then you have the magic items, in prefixed or suffixed, in blue text.

After that comes the rare stuff. The text is in yellow, there are more magical properties.

And then there's the stuff that you grind for. The stuff that you spend hours and hours on, killing the same monsters over and over again, hoping to see an orange spire of light rising from the ground, hoping to see an orange star on the minimap. That's a legendary. The legendary item is usually just a little better than the rare gear you have, but once in a while you get a beauty.

So, I found this sword - it was level 70 when I found it, and did around 2400 damage. But that wasn't the great thing about it. The killer was the "Chance to summon a demonic slave". Not only does the demonic slave pop up every now now, but he is linked to you by CHAINS OF FIRE, and those chains do massive damage. So you get your enemy - or mob between your demonic slave and yourself, and watch the chains BURN through your foes. With this, I was able to graduate from killing wimpy zombies on normal to Rift Guardians (really bad bosses) on Torment.

But the bosses are incidental. The storyline is incidental. Its about gear. Grinding for gear. Hoping that the next piece of equipment will be better than the one that you have. Raising the difficulty, fighting bosses, entering rifts and hoping you'll see that star on your minimap. It's the distillation of consumerism, it's the addiction reflex, and I've been playing the game more or less non stop for the last couple of weeks.