#movedoverfrommedium

The House in Smallville Hides Much

Obviously, I’m not a fiction writer. I’m certainly not very good at it. That’s a trick that I wish I could pull off, the ability to be creative on demand, as a regular thing. I’m a “get out of my fucking head” writer, and this is something that occured to me. I’ve learned over the years, better to get it out, even if it’s ridiculous. So here is this foolishness.

Superman, the Kents, and Pete Ross are all copyright of DC and whomever else owns their copyrights. I think I came up with Phil Barnes, M.D., but maybe not. Definitely came up with Ev. 

I would like to thank Zach Snyder and Henry Cavill for being willing to not endlessly try to recreate what Christopher Reeve once did so well. Better to risk failure than make the same thing forever. Brandon Routh might agree. I’d also like to thank Zach Snyder for this scene that got me thinking about what it was like for the Kents to make Kal-El into Clark Kent.

“I think it’s broken”

“What do you mean Jonathan?”

“Clark reached out and grabbed my finger. Next thing I know, I hear a crack, it feels numb, and well, look at it”

“Are you saying Clark…that a baby…broke your finger just by grabbing it?”

Jonathan Kent hesitates to answer, even with the reality of his finger, it’s ridiculous. “…Yes…yes…I am.”

They both look at the infant, all smiles, blue eyes, and the beginnings of what will be almost jet-black hair reaching up for them. They won’t say it, not to each other, certainly never to Clark, but they feel fear. The kind of fear no parent should feel, no parent on earth has ever felt. The fear that their child is far stronger and stranger than they can imagine. They both look at each other and think about tantrums and pouting and door-slamming.

“Jonathan…what do we do?”

“What do you mean?”

“An infant just broke your finger by grabbing it. That’s not the first thing he’s done that a human, much less a baby shouldn’t be able to do. He never gets a bump or a bruise. He barely notices falling down. How do we…how do we raise him to live around people, who will be afraid of him or shun him or worse? How do we raise an alien to be human?”

Jonathan stares at his child, then down at his finger for long seconds.

“We…we teach him. We teach him how to live in a world that will be glass figurines and houses of cards. We teach him how to manage his emotions and why he can never give in to anger.”

“…or happiness.”

“Or happiness.”

Those last two words break their hearts as thoroughly as Jonathan’s rapidly swelling index finger.

Luckily, breaks, bumps and bruises are normal on a farm. Jonathan has never gone a year without needing to be bandaged up for something. Most families have multiple sets of crutches and reusable casts. “Pastoral” never meant “easy”.

“I Hurt Mama!!”

Clark, now a toddler, huddles in the corner of the living room, too upset to cry, horrified at the look on his mother’s face. Martha, pale with the pain of three broken ribs, draws on the reserves you get from a life of farm labor, straightens up, and says “No honey, not really. I’m okay, see? All smiles!”

Jonathan, hearing Martha’s cry of pain from where he was working the barn, rushes in, sees right through his wife’s pretense, then looks at Clark, in the corner, tears starting to well in the child’s eyes. The boy’s face is contorted by a look Jonathan hasn’t seen in decades, a look he thought he left behind in the deserts his country once sent him to.

It’s the look of someone who’s just realized just how capable they are of causing pain. He also sees the odd cast to Clark’s eyes, the way the boy seems totally focused on Martha.

“What happened?” he asks, his tone as calm and light as humanly possible.

Martha inhales, shallowly. He knows that inhale, it’s the way you breathe when you’ve messed up your ribcage. His cows regularly give him reason to breathe that way. “He…he tied his shoes for the first time. He was so excited, he came running in to show me. I told him what a smart boy he is and held my arms out for a hug. He…forgot. He hugged me the way he wanted to.”

If this were new, she’d sound far more shattered. But this has been their life with Clark ever since his ship crashed on their farm. Everything is devoted to teaching him how to live with people infinitely more delicate than he is. They have learned to master their emotions on levels that would make a Zen master jealous. Clark is sensitive to their emotions, but still lacks the control to master that sensitivity.

No one really notices this change in the Kents. At his emotive best, Jonathan Kent is the embodiment of taciturn, and Martha has always been one for quiet displays. A small smile from her is the equivalent of squealing joy from others. People see the Kents as they’ve always seen them, because it’s what they want to see.

Slowly, calmly, a smile he only half-feels on his face, he sits down next to the boy. Clark shrinks back, afraid of what he might do to his father. Jonathan reaches out to the boy, to rub his back. Clark flinches at the touch, but doesn’t try to move away. Physical contact has always soothed him more than any lullaby or blanket.

“Clark,” he says, “your mom’s okay. She’s gonna be a little sore for a bit, you’re a very strong boy.” Clark shakes his head, slowly, deliberately, never taking his eyes off of his mother. “No…mama’s…broke. I broke mama.” The tears now flow freely down his face, the most visible sign of what he’s feeling.

“Jonathan?”

“Yes?”

“I can’t explain it…but where Clark’s looking…it’s warm”

Jonathan looks at his son’s eyes for a minute. He slowly waves his hand up and down in front of them. Clark doesn’t react. As his hand goes in front of the boy’s eyes, he feels it, a zone of warmth, like the heat lamps he uses in the barn during the winter.

“Clark…Clark…son…look at me”

The boy turns his head slowly, unwillingly, as if his mother will run away the instant he’s not looking at her. The warmth follows his gaze.

“Son…look at me where you were looking at your mother. Am I…broke…too?”

Clark stares at the lower part of his father’s torso. Jonathan can feel himself getting warm over the area his son is staring at.

“No daddy. You’re not broke. Mama is broke, I broke her…I’m…I’m…bad”

Without thinking, as any father would, Jonathan pulls the boy into his lap, burying his face in his son’s hair.

“No son, you’re not bad. You’re a good boy. What happened was an accident, and we’ll help you be more careful so it doesn’t happen again, but you’re not a bad boy. You’re a good boy, you’re our good boy, and we love you.”

Martha slowly, painfully sits next to them, facing opposite her husband so she can put an arm around her son, who’s now softly crying. “Clark, you’re a good boy.” she says. “We’re a family, you’re our son, and we love you.”

If anyone had told her, when they were first married, that she’d be sitting on the ground listening to Jonathan Kent, who had barely said ten words when he proposed to her, telling his son what a good boy he is and how much he loves him, over and over, she’d have laughed. But perhaps more than she does, Jonathan understands, instinctively, that Clark somehow knows he’s different, and so he makes sure to tell the boy just how much he’s loved as much as possible.

Martha knows about bonding, for both babies and the livestock they raise. She’s watched friends and family raise their children, helped out. The Kents have always been willing to be the sitter of last resort for their neighbors. But this is different. The Kents realize they’re not just bonding with Clark as a family, but bonding Clark to humanity. Creating the ties he’ll need as he gets older, so he doesn’t feel like any more of an outsider than he has to.

As Clark calms down, and realizes that he’s still loved, and that his parents still think he’s a good boy, Jonathan reaches into his jacket pocket for his cell to call Doc Barnes and let him know that another accident had happened, that they’ll be coming into his office.

They leave the question of a boy who can see broken ribs for later.

“How much can we trust you?”

No doctor ever wants to hear that phrase, because nothing good ever comes from that phrase. It’s three years before Clark will break his mother’s ribs in his joy over tying his shoes for the first time.

Phil Barnes, M.D., one of two doctors in Smallville sits in his office, looking at Jonathan Kent. He’s tempted to make a joke, but the look in Jonathan’s eyes strangles that impulse. Whatever is going on, there’s nothing funny about it.

“Jonathan, I’ve been you and Martha’s doctor for almost twenty years now, I think I’ve…”

Kent cuts him off with a quick shake of the head. “This is different Doc. This is…I have to know. How much can we trust you.”

“I took an oath Jonathan, to always keep my patients’ trust.”

Jonathan stares his doc dead in the eyes, never wavering or looking away. “I knew a lot of men in the Army who’d taken oaths to never take a life. They still killed. I have to know. How. Much. Can. We. Trust. You.”

Doc Barnes thinks a minute. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but he knows the man in front of him, possibly better than Martha does. “Jonathan, if it’s something illegal, or even close…” he trails off, unwilling to fully voice the possibilities. Sometimes, in this part of the country, of wide open spaces and closed people, things go wrong. People go wrong, and you can never tell until after the damage is done.

Jonathan laughs, the most un-humorous sound a man can make and still call it laughter. “No Doc, I promise, it’s not illegal. I’m not even sure if that applies. I just need to know that if I take you into this, you’ll never tell anyone. Not your wife, not your kids, not your priest. You’ll never write it down more than you have to, and when you die, it goes with you.”

There’s a long pause. “Jonathan…I’m your doctor, and I’m your friend. If you need me to keep my eyes open and my mouth closed…you’ve got that.”

Jonathan Kent sits back and exhales as though a massive weight has been lifted. “Thank god…I need you to follow me out to the house. Bring your bag. Bring a couple of syringes too, ones you can afford to lose.”

“Jonathan…what’s going on?”

“I can’t tell you doc. I can’t even begin to explain it. You have to see it.”

Doc Barnes watches the needle snap on the boy’s arm. The child, a year old at the most, doesn’t react at all. Unsurprising, since the needle barely dented his skin, much less broke through it.

He looks at Jonathan and Martha, waiting for them to tell him what he suspects.

The couple looks at each other and Martha nods, then collects the baby, Clark, she said his name was, and sits him on her lap, arms around him as though she fears someone will try to snatch him out of their living room.

“Doc, you remember that meteor that crashed out on my back 40 a couple weeks past?” “Sure I do Jonathan, it lit up the sky. Everyone was talking about it.” “It…wasn’t a metor. It was a spaceship. Clark was in it, the only passenger.”

If he hadn’t just snapped two needles on an infant’s arm as though they were made of spun sugar, he’d have been planning how to get the Kents into psychiatric treatment. But the broken metal in his hands tells him that however fantastic this sounds, it’s real.

Jonathan pauses, takes a deep breath, as though what he’s about to say next is something he’s afraid to say out loud. “He’s an alien, Phil. He’s not human. He looks human, but he’s not. You’ve seen how hard his skin is. He’s strong too. This finger?” Jonathan waves a well-braced and wrapped finger at him. “He did that. With less effort than you’d use to pour coffee.”

Barnes shakes his head, unable to really process this. “Okay, so if he’s an alien…what do you want from me?” “Help”. That’s Martha, barely clamping down on the desperation she feels. “If he grows like a…human, he’s going to need to go to school. They’ll want vaccination records.” She starts slowly rocking back and forth, as much for her as for Clark.

“Even if you could give him a shot, would it work? Or would it make him sick?” She talks faster, almost stumbling over her words, weeks of anxiety tumbling out. “We need…books and help on how to manage our temper, our emotions, help on how to teach him to manage his. If he’s that strong, if he’s what we’ve seen…he’s going to have to learn how to pretend to be human. We can’t do it all on our own, we barely know where to start.”

The enormity of what his friends face hits Doc Barnes full force. “You’ll…you’ll need adoption papers. I can’t fake a pregnancy Martha, everyone knows you two can’t have kids. But I think I can come up with something that will give you a believable adoption. And Ev’s been on me to try all that meditation crap she likes so much, so I’ve got a house full of books on how to stay calm in a forest fire.” They all smile a bit at that, Mrs. Barnes’ fascination with various eastern religions is well known in Smallville.

A thought hits him. “Martha…have you tried to cut his hair?” “Phil, he’s a baby, he’s barely got any hair.” “That’s going to change, and if his hair’s as tough as the rest of him, I don’t think a set of Fiskars is going to do you much good.” Jonathan thinks a moment. “I may be able to do something about that. I dug out a hole for the ship that brought him under that old barn my granddad built. The metal on it’s hard, but it melted a little when it crashed. I think I can make some scissors out of that in my forge. Hopefully, if they both come from the same place, we can use them.

“Lucky you’re a packrat” the Doc says. “Lord, don’t encourage him” says Martha and they all laugh at that. It’s not all that funny, but they need that bit of normalcy, badly. It’ll be a long time before any of them see normal again.

Barnes stands up to leave. “Well, I think I’m going to be spending a lot of time on faking a set of medical records. Just tell me he’s the only one.” “So far he is Doc.” “Good. I don’t think I could handle a passle of super-babies.” They all laugh again, and Barnes exits through the kitchen door. He’s able to hold off the shakes on the drive home, barely, until he pulls into his garage. “Dear Jesus…an alien.” He looks up at the roof of his truck long and hard. “God…I know they say you never give us more than we can handle. But I think this time you’re pushing it a bit.”

“Going Camping?”

Jonathan looks at Mr. Ross, caught completely off-guard by the question. “Pardon?” The owner of Smallville’s main supply store laughs a bit and waves at the items Jonathan has set on the counter. “Metal plates, cups, mugs, steel silverware…looks like you’re taking the whole family camping”. Jonathan returns the laugh, happy that his friend has provided the perfect response. “Yep. Clark’s old enough now that I think a camping trip with his mother and it’d be a fun thing to do this summer. I can get away for a few days without the farm falling apart.”

They both chuckle at that, and Jonathan leaves the store with his box of gear. It’s not until he gets in the truck that he lets out the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. He knows no one other than the doc knows about Clark, but the low-level paranoia him and Martha live with never really goes away. With Clark a summer away from first grade, it’s starting to move up from low-level.

The metal tableware was Martha’s idea, after Clark had destroyed even heavy stoneware. “Jonathan, just get some metal things. He needs something sturdy enough that he can learn how to be delicate.” The look on his face had exasperated her. “Clark is probably strong enough to lift the truck at this point, you can’t expect him to suddenly be able to deal with glass or pottery. It’s the same as for any other child, only for him, “unbreakable” is a bit more than a plastic sippy cup from the Witchita Wal-Mart.”

That, he’d understood, so he’d drove into town to Ross’s Tractor Supply to get the things they’d need.

It’s gotten easier in some ways. Clark’s more aware of his strength, and the constant calm they live under has ensured that he rarely gets close to a tantrum. Their parents think they spoil the boy rotten, but he’s well-behaved, quiet, and polite, even at his age, so the complaints are more pro forma than anything else.

In other ways…well, Clark being able to see through things (everything but lead, they’ve learned) was a bit of a problem. Clark being able to set things on fire with his eyes…that one took some work. Fortunately, either kind of “vision” requires a conscious effort to use, so they’ve gotten good results by treating it the same way they broke him of picking his nose.

There’s been some mild disagreement about how to explain Clark to the teachers at Smallville elementary. Doc Barnes suggested they let the school know Clark is mildly autistic, which would cover a plethora of Clark’s behavioral oddities, but the Kents are not happy with this. They know autistic kids, Martha’s helped their parents out regularly, they love those kids to death, but saying Clark is “on the spectrum” as a cover story, just to explain him being different, is something that sticks in their craw for reasons they can’t quite articulate. Eventually, they’ll just decide that he’s “sensitive” which is true enough.

“Sensitive” will explain as much as “autistic” and won’t be a lie.

They have fewer visitors these days. Makes it easier to keep Clark’s “training course” set up in the living room. The “obstacle course” as the Kents refer to it is an odd one. Rather than being full of rugged things like ladders and walls and mudpits, it’s a collection of things that you’d see almost anywhere. Silhouettes of people and small animals, stacks of glasses and china, a perfectly ordinary door, a window, and…a hand. Made from a well-worn rubber glove, sometimes full of gelatin, or those toy “snap ’n’ pops” that Ross sells around New Year’s and the 4th of July.

It’s a course designed to teach Clark how to function in a world that he’s literally alien to. A world that, as he grows, (thankfully at a “normal” rate) is less and less able to hurt him. Other than a bit of queasiness if he spends too much time near parts of the ship he landed in, something the Kents attribute to vague memories of how terrifying re-entry must have been, there’s almost nothing of Earth that can affect him, much less harm him.

Clark’s never had a cold, or even a runny nose. The allergies that sometimes drive Martha spare (“I’ve grown up around wheat fields, how am I allergic to them?” is her usual gripe, to which Jonathan smiles and remembers to pick up extra benadryl when he runs into town) never affect Clark. While there are foods he doesn’t particularly like (liver, most notably. He’s seen it raw, he won’t even try it), there’s nothing he’s allergic to. It’s a nice counterbalance to the inability to vaccinate him by needle. Doc Barnes just filled out the forms at the right time, fed Clark oral “vaccines” in front of his nurses while feeding them a line about Clark being terrified of needles, so they could truthfully say he’d been vaccinated if asked. They didn’t need to know it was sugar water and a bit of food dye for color.

The obstacle course is something Clark deals with daily. He’s gotten quite good at it. It’s designed to help him be hyper-aware of bumping/brushing into things & people, and how hard to squeeze when shaking hands with people. None of this is “natural” for Clark. He’s had to work harder than any child his age should have to work at things like “Shaking hands without crushing them” and “how to bump into people like a human.”

None of these are things anyone normally has to learn beyond basic politeness. But if Clark gets a handshake wrong, or bumps into someone too hard, he could cripple them. At the same time they’re teaching him to be hyperaware of his body and how he moves, they’re working even harder to teach him how to not hear everything for miles. That’s where the books on meditation have been a lifesaver.

For a small child for whom having a cat meowing five miles away be just as loud as it is for the person who’s lap it’s sitting in, all the noise made by humans, animals, and the weather is almost traumatic. But, they’ve slowly helped him learn to control his hearing as much as he controls the more active aspects of his vision.

In many ways, at the age of seven, Clark Kent could give a stereotypical Shaolin Monk a run for their money in the meditation and focus areas. He wakes before his parents now, and spends that time, dead quiet for everyone else, sitting in his bed, going through the meditations that help him block out the sounds of a planet that never truly sleeps.

He’s gained a reputation of being a shy child. But he’s not shy. He’s watching, the way his parents have taught him to. How fast the other kids run. How high they jump. When to cry, when to shake it off. Months before starting first grade, Clark Kent has learned more about how people interact with their world than most of the faculty of Kansas State.

The Kents are grateful that Clark isn’t human or close to it. A human boy of Clark’s age would never be able to handle any of this at the level he has to. But Clark is far smarter and more mature than a human boy his age would be, and from what they can tell, has a nigh-perfect memory.

It’s not all testing. It’s not all day-in/day-out drills. There’s love, too. As the Kents have taught Clark how to be human, Clark has taught them how to be more free with their feelings. They’re hardly touchy-feely outside of the house, but inside, hugs and kisses are given and accepted freely, and it’s okay to make a mistake. “Messing up is just God’s way of reminding you that you’re not perfect and you have to always try harder.” is Jonathan’s philosophy.

By giving Clark the freedom to make mistakes, and a safe space in which to make them, they avoid what would be the horrible mistake of teaching him that he either has to be, or worse, is perfect.

Clark will learn more, and grow more, and over time, become the man the world looks up to, the man who will sacrifice himself to keep his world safe. Then, somehow, he’ll come back. As Superman, he’ll speak of Earth as his “adopted” world because he has to. The danger to his mother is too great to do otherwise.

(this was originally published on Medium on 31 Jan. 17)

Lemme tell you about a hardcore refugee situation, at least for the United States...

As I’ve talked about before in various places, I grew up in Miami. My family moved there when I was three years old. Had my 3rd birthday on the train from Chicago. I joined the Air Force in 1986, and started basic on Halloween of 1986. (Never start basic on Halloween. TRUST ME.)

So I lived in Miami between 1970 and 1986, with a few years in the very early 90s (Fuck You Andrew.)

Which means I was living in Miami in 1980, which was kind of a banner year in many ways. Arthur McDuffie and the Liberty City riots. Y’all don’t even start to try to call the folks not being “nice” to the cops in Fergeson a riot. If that’s what you call a riot, you’re young, or lucky. It was also the year that a union, of all things, led by Lech Walesa started the strikes that would eventually overturn the communist government of Poland.

(Yeah. A union did that. You millenial techies just learning how to organize? Go talk to the unions. They know how to do that shit.)

And starting on April 15th, a little thing called the Mariel Boatlift happened. Between 15 April and 31 October 1980, just under one hundred twenty five thousand people fled Cuba for Miami. According to the 1980 census, Miami had a population of 346,681 in Miami proper, and 1,625,781 in Miami-Dade county overall.

Ponder that for a second. In the space of four months, depending on how you count, a number of refugees between 7% and 35% of the total Miami (Dade) population just showed up. Here, the breakdown from Wikipedia:

None of them were vetted. Shit, Castro was emptying out his jails. You think Trump’s imaginary Syrian terrorists are bad? Do. Not. Make. Me. Laugh. Here, more numbers. Murder Rates in Miami in the 1980s:

1980: 573

1981: 621

1985: 434

Sorry for missing some years, overall numbers are a pain in the ass to find. But I want you to look at something, specifically 1981. 621 murders. in 2016, Chicago, a city with as of 2010, had a population of just under ten million people had something like 762 murders, and people are freaking the fuck out. Miami, just over a tenth the size of Chicago at the time had almost that many murders.

As best I can tell, everyone in my graduating class had seen at least one dead body. Quite a few of us had witnessed the transition. Shit was weird. In the mid 1980s, this happened:

“Consider this real-life scene: A twenty-two-year-old Miami cop encounters a man strolling at dawn in a quiet neighborhood. The man is naked and carrying the severed head of a young woman. He throws the head at the cop — twice. “I killed her. She’s the devil!” the man shouts. What does that young cop say to the people who ask how his day went?”

Excerpt From: Edna Buchanan. “The Corpse Had a Familiar Face.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-corpse-had-a-familiar-face/id381566184?mt=11

Her name was Drew. I never knew her last name. We worked together, along with her roommate, at the newsstand in the Coral Gables Bus Terminal. She was funny, sarcastic, put up with no one’s shit, and tried to help me not be such a dweeb. If I am being honest, I had a crush on her, but I was far too scared to let her know. I think she knew anyway.

One fine day, her boyfriend came back from California with something terribly wrong inside, and she was dead. Didn’t even make the front page. It was pre-cell phone, pre-social media. I didn’t even know it had happened, until I saw her roommate a while later, and we were catching up and I said, “So how’s Drew doing?”

Awwwwkward.

It took me a while to convince her that I honestly hadn’t heard, I didn’t know and oh god, I am so sorry for saying that, even out of ignorance. But think about this for a minute:

A cop and an insane person played “hot potato” with Drew’s goddamned head, and it wasn’t even front page news.

That kind of shit is what happens when someone dumps the contents of their jails on you. Not all prisoners in Cuba were political. Some were just scary. To this day, I can’t watch “Scarface”. Too much of it isn’t exaggeration.

I remember because in the fall of 1980, I started 9th grade, and no one was ready for the change in the school demographics. But it happened. The crime rate skyrocketed, shit was so weird that those of us who grew up in Miami in that time can only really relate to people from NYC in the 1970s and LA in the 1990s.

And, we got through it. We figured it out. We arrested the bad folks, and the good folks were awesome. (There was some interesting things going on between the “Marielitos” and the folks who’d come over in the 1960s. A lot of it was not good.) Along the way, whatever culture I was “from”, a lot of it was Cuban. I didn’t live in some honkie enclave, behind gates, only venturing out in tremulous groups.

Shit, my family didn’t even have a car, I rode the bus, or I walked. And, I wasn’t really messed with. I saw fucked up shit, and I saw amazing stuff. I went to parties on Star Island that I only vaguely remember. I was introduced to a plethora of drugs and mostly ignored it all. I totally flunked out of college, but I don’t feel too bad about it. Ultimately, it was one of the best things that happened to me.

I became a person from a single city that had combined two countries, which is why I think the regular freakouts over spanish is so stupid. Mostly because shit, I don’t even know how to order Cuban food in English. What the fuck even is that? It’s Picadillo y maduros y Materva, not ground beef and spices over rice and fried rotting plantains and Yerba Mate soda. Christ, can you imagine ordering Ropa Vieja in English? “Yes, I’d like some old clothes over rice please.”

Sigh.

The point is, we actually had shit going down for a decade after Mariel. We had a murder rate that was literally multiple times the murder rate of the rest of the country in terms of per capita. We beat NYC a few times. (…yay?…)

What we didn’t do was hide in the fucking closet and cry. We didn’t ban Cuban immigrants. We didn’t tremble before the terrifying might of a fucking five-year-old child.

Jesus, the people who are simultaneously bad motherfuckers and terrified of a five-year-old child are all older than me. You can’t blame the millenials for this, this is all baby boomer shit. Probably some GenX in there, some of us are fucking stupid.

Good thing none of them were on 8th street in the 80s, they’d still be shitting their pants.

Stop freaking the fuck out. If one small southern city and county could survive Miami’s version of the 1980s, an entire fucking country will do just fine in the face of the destructive might of a five-year-old child.

(originally published on 18 Nov. 2015)

If only you’d look to the side once in a while

Somewhat odd fact: I’ve never been really anywhere outside of the U.S. Not that I’m anti-travel, it just seemed to never work out. I mean, I’ve been to Toronto, spent a summer in Mississauga with my cousin Diane and her family, and technically went near Nassau on a night-time cruise, but I was so obliterated that I don’t know if I left the boat.

I was in the Air Force, but at a B-1B base in the mid-80s to early-90s, and so we didn’t really even start going overseas for air shows and exercises until I was fixing to separate. Then came a marriage and a kid and it kind of just never happened. Which I do think is a shame, but I can’t say I’ve not done anything cool, I just did it all…here.

This came up because I was talking to a good friend of mine, N., who is much smarter and well-traveled than I, (and for a Cali transplant, still understands why Waffle House is amazing.) I was commenting how a mutal acquaintance, who is my age, seems to have just woken up to the reality that non-honkies in the U.S. have very different lives than honkies do. I said I didn’t get how someone could be as well-traveled as he is, (he has literally traveled the globe) and still be so…blind…to the world outside of his somewhat narrow set of interests. This legitimately puzzled me until N. explained it.

She said, (paraphrased) that if you’re traveling on business, to a conference or on a book tour or what have you, that it’s easy. You get off the plane and go to the hotel. Which is probably a Marriot or other chain, and where the club sandwich in Tokyo is exactly like the club sandwich in Des Moines. You are driven to where you need to be when you need to be there, you go out after to a restaurant, maybe a bar that is tourist-friendly, and then back to the hotel. After a few days, home you go. Maybe you take a day for being a tourist, but you’re going to do fairly standard stuff.

You do that enough, and there’s no difference between anywhere.

I can’t argue her point, I literally don’t know, but it struck me as sad. To be somewhere totally different, but wrap yourself in a cocoon of home, like some kind of odd warp bubble.

Because while I’ve never really left the U.S., there’s always been this “walkabout” impulse. I probably got it from my mom, who as a single woman, lived in Tokyo immediately following WWII for some years, (and evidently spent enough time near Hiroshima to come home rather sick for more than a few months), and then in the 50s and 60s, literally traveled everywhere in this country where a train would go. I’ve pictures of her in D.C., at Gettysburg, Monticello, San Francisco, you name it.

In an era where being an independent woman was somewhat frowned upon, she was independent. Mind you, she never learned to drive. This was all public transit and trains.

My dad helped too, he’d been in Japan & Korea in the early 50s, trying not to die during a war, and getting into marvelous trouble in Japan on leaves and furloughs.

One of his better stories, one that fascinated me was about how he and his friends would go to a restaurant in either country, and just blindly order. Whoever got the ugliest dish paid. He thought he was safe when a friend got the squid. Until a WHOLE OCTOPUS, eyes and all, broiled in its own ink was placed in front of him.

That always seemed like the coolest thing: go to a restaurant you’ve never been and just order something. How cool a way to learn new food? Sometimes, you get the octopus, sometimes you get amazing malaysian food. Amazing wins over OMG WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT more than you might think. Food is a great introduction to different cultures.

As I’ve mentioned, I grew up in Miami. My family moved down in 1970, and I didn’t really leave until 1986, when I joined the Air Force. I was there for some shit. Mariel, Liberty City, Murder Capital of the world, Cocaine Cowboys, (I still can’t really watch “Scarface”. Because too much of that movie isn’t some gorefest story, it’s what was happening in my world. There’s not a lot of exaggeration there), all of it.

It’s easy to fall into the tropes. Miami’s a pit, it’s a crimefest, it’s nothing but Cubans. But that’s the saddest way to look at it. Because Miami showed me so many things. ¿Qué Pasa USA? Pastelitos. Pecadillo. A properly made Cuban sangwich. The smell of the wall of ovens baking Cuban bread in an Imperial Supermarket just off 8th Street and Salzedo. The bizarre joy that was the Bed Race. Goombay, where I discovered a host of carribean food and music. Tito Puente. Gloria Estefan before she was Gloria Estefan. Guava. Flan. Materva. The Red Room. The Kitchen. Coconut Grove when there were still more hippies than hipsters. The Friday night Hare Krishna Drum Party in Coconut Grove, where you’d have a hundred people dancing along with the Krishnas and they would just play their asses off. The guy who sold small crabs and palmetto bugs dipped in gold.

It’s actually hard for me to talk about Cuban Culture like it’s some separate thing, because I grew up in it. I’m not Cuban, not even close, but that culture was a part of my youth and my adolescence. It’s not “other people’s” culture. It’s a part of me as much as it can be. You grow up in Miami, your first concert is P-Funk, it’s hard to live in The Honkie Zone™.

Here’s an example of how it affected me. One day, after I’d gotten out of the Air Force, my boss takes me to a Cuban place in Pinellas Park, La Terecita. (AmazingCuban food, BTW.) The waitress seats us, sees we’re a table of superhonkies, and gives us menus. With the food in english. I literally had no idea what any of it was, because you order Cuban food in spanish. What the fuck other language even makes sense? So I ask the waitress, when she returns, “Is there a spanish menu? I don’t know what any of this is in English.”

She looks at me and asks “Where you from?” I tell her Miami, she laughs and says “Okay baby, let me get you the menu.” (If you know what a Cuban accent sounds like, then you get more of the picture.) She comes back with a Spanish one, aka a real one, and at last, I can order my Picadillo y maduros y Materva. Fuck me, english, what use is that?

You also never understand why people are puzzled at children drinking coffee, because you start kids on cafe con leche as soon as they’re off the tit. I mean it. Non-Miamians don’t really get how central Cuban coffee is to life down there. Water is minor, cafecitos are critical.

As a kid in Miami, this was my “community pool”, Venetian Pool. It’s an old limestone quarry converted to a pool. To be able to use the diving boards, you had to swim across the pool without stopping, watched by the lifeguards. That was what turned you from a little kid to a big kid. Swimming is a necessity, because half your elementary school field trips are to the beach. Yeah, yeah, education, starfish, the stingray shuffle. I’m still convinced it was how the teachers wangled free midday beach time. As they should.

Some places brag about how you can watch the sun rise and set over the ocean by just walking a few miles. In Miami, on the highway out to Key Biscayne, you could do that just by turning around. Then there’s Stiltsville, and a not-long drive away, things like Pennekamp and Key West. Along with treasures now gone, like Ocean World, and Miami Marine Stadium, where you could see unlimited hydroplanes, and watch concerts with the stoners on rafts in the middle.

I was also there for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Andrew. My biggest memory of that is just after the hurricane, when shit is still fucked up and Gloria Estefan, who unlike most celebrities, grew up in Miami, and is a hometown girl, holding a benefit in the Orange Bowl, to raise money to help folks out. It’s kind of fucked up, power is still wonky, she is a bit of a sweaty mess, (we all were), and yet there she is, singing “Coming Out of the Dark”, and somehow, everything was going to be okay. Gloria Estefan will always be okay in my book for that.

I don’t think you can grow up with my parents in that town and not look to the side every so often. Or all the time. And it helped me see, not just the bloody obvious truth, like the lives lived different of non-honkies in this country, but all the things.

Like driving between base and town in Grand Forks on highway 2, happy to be off early, (at 2am) and it’s one of those snowstorms where it’s not a blizzard, but the flakes are coming down big, wet and noisy. You can actually hear them hit, and as I come around a curve, there’s this explosion of light, and two two trucks pulling a semi out of the ditch. As Toccata & Fuge in D Minor is blasting in my Civic. Pipe organ version, of course. There is something perfect about that, along with Bach at 2am during another snowfall in the middle of nowhere.

Or another night, same highway, same time of day, only it’s summer, and there’s this flash of light and a roar I only hear because my windows are down, and as I look up, I see a metor blasting through the sky overhead, on fire, big trail of smoke. I pull right the fuck over because if it hits, fuck yeah, i’m gonna get a piece. (No, the obvious downsides didn’t occur to me, because ROCK FROM SPACE.) It burned up completely before it hit, but I got to see it.

You look to the side, and you find things. Like malaysian restuarants in Kansas City. Or how, in Biloxi, just outside of Keesler AFB, if you and your friends go to the same Chinese place enough, and keep ordering “something with beef, something with pork, something with chicken, and surprise us” enough, eventually the family that runs it starts making you the non-gweilo versions of things. Or that there’s a fantastic Dim Sum place not a half-block from the Moscone in S.F., an amazing cajun place in Knob Knoster, MO, and one of the best southern restaurants ever is near Binghampton, NY, (THEO’S4LYFE!)

You see things that other folks miss. Like a tango club performance in Union square, where the guy in his 70s is shaming all the younger men. Because he may be old and slow everywhere else, but he is the Tango grandmaster and the youngin’s best just step back, this is his show.

Walden Pond. It’s not just where Thoreau lived, (with lots of help from his friends. He may have wrote about self-reliance, but he was not so good at practicing it) it’s a place. It’s a swimmin’ hole. Kind of cold, but very beautiful, and a great place to take slow walks with friends. The whaling museum in Peabody. Realizing that on multiple occasions, a pre-fame/pre-Gaiman Amanda Palmer made you milkshakes and sundaes (and she was very good at it.)

You become best friends with everyone in a ten-meter radius at a crawfish festival, because you just can’t suck head, and so you give away heaping plates full of the nasty things to anyone within reach. For this, you get a lot of free beer. Some years later, at Bad Medicine Lake in MN, you gorge on the biggest crawfish you’ve ever seen, (LOBSTER-SIZED) because people up there think they’re gross, and the bottom of the lake is covered with them. It is totally worth the hypothermia you risk, and pissing off a plethora of plastered, pulchritudinous sorority sisters because if they reject crawdads, they can’t be worth your time.

You meet people who aren’t like you, and learn at a young age, just how full of shit you are, and maybe you should fix that. You pick up foul words in multiple languages, (profanity starts both fights and friendships. Often simultaneously.) You learn that the “stripper paying her way through college” isn’t just a trope, and she amazes you both with her pole work and her analysis of pre-Revolutionary War America.

You discover, if you’re open to it, that there are amazing people everywhere in all walks of life, doing all kinds of jobs you aren’t, and they are just fascinating. That there are former adult stars on Twitter who build amazing models of Star Wars ships from metal because that’s what they do, when they aren’t losing their minds over the San Jose Sharks or making beautiful art. They talk about their work too, and that’s even neat because you learn about the behind the scenes stuff. “Inside baseball” is fucking fascinating when it’s about porn. (Ed. note: this person checked out a few years ago. I genuinely miss her, and presence on Twitter.)

You learn that two authors you admire who have become friends have forgotten more about food and culture than you’ll ever know. You learn the history of Switzerland that’s about just how terrifying the Swiss are, “…I’m from Northern Ireland, I don’t do well with unannounced gunfire.”, and that a description of dinner eating between two members of old Russian Royalty can be far, far more…intense than any non-porn writing has a right to. (Seriously, hie thee to wherever you can find them, and read all of “Tales of Old Russia” by Peter Morwood. DESCRIPTIONS OF DINNER SHOULD NOT HAVE THAT EFFECT ON PEOPLE.)

Actually, if you see anything with either Peter or Diane Duane as authors or co-authors, just read it. Trust me on this.

There are a lot of guides out there for doing stuff. Want to write a blog, there’s a guide telling you all the tools you must have to do it. Podcasting? There are Mic guides, and Editing software guides and studio setup guides. Video podcasting? Same thing.

As someone who’s done a bit of it all, except for video, here’s my advice: Fuck gear, get your thoughts out there. Get what is in you, out. If you want to blog, pick any blogging service and write. If you want to podcast, get the mic you can afford, a pair of earphones, and start talking.

Stop Worrying About Gear

Nice gear never hurts, but no one, no. one. ever listened to a shitty podcast because OMG THE SOUND QUALITY. No one reads crappy blogs just because the font and CSS stylings are so good. Good content will survive shitty gear. Content is what’s in you. Content is that thing inside you that you have to get out. Don’t ever not get that thing out because you don’t have a nice mic, or you don’t know helvetica from courier.

Watch this:

https://youtu.be/hnsQRpgYmaE

That’s Jack White making music with shit gear. Literally, a board with some nails, a coke bottle, and a rigged pickup. The music doesn’t come from the guitar, the music comes from him. The guitar is just the way he gets the thing out. As he says “Who says you have to buy a guitar?”

There’s nothing wrong with gear. But in the end, the gear is just a tool. A million dollars’ worth of gear will just sit there like the an expensive lump of shit until someone picks it up and uses it. You don’t need the gear, the gear needs you. YOU make the thing the gear is used for. You are what’s important. The gear is just stuff. Gear makes nothing. You make everything.

So when you read reviews of gear and all that, treat them like a list of tips that may be handy later. Then go back to what you were doing.

But that doesn’t make crap smell better

As much as I hate to do this to you…here, go read this: http://www.cio.com/article/2974697/macbook/most-apple-devices-lack-proper-security-for-the-enterprise.html

Sigh.

Sigh.

SIGGGHHHHHHHH

Or, if you prefer it in meme form:

Shit like that usually means you’re too stupid for even hyenas to eat.

Now, if you’re thinking “normally I put the stupid out of my thoughts as fast as possible, but this one does have a familiar flavor”, well, you’re right. It’s by Matt Kapko, CIO.com Senior Writer, who covers social media. And mobile enterprise as well. You’ve seen me talking about his…outflow…before, most notably here:

https://bynkii.tumblr.com/post/175256406870/superannuation-on-display

Yes, that’s the guy who sprayed…that…all over the internet.

Evidently, he covers both social media and enterprise mobile the same way. It seems to involved drinking half a keg of cheap beer, eating a pound of laxatives, then seeing what he can divine from what he finds drying in the sun the next morning.

This post, dear reader(s) is shit. It is pure shit, nigh-perfect shit. It is couched in all the terms designed to get hits, but make no mistake, it is in fact, shit, and it shows that Matt Kapko, and evidently, CIO.com, have in fact gone full klein bottle, and should only be used for lining the bottoms of bird cages. Not birds you like, some of them may be able to read.

Where to start…well, first, he talks about a survey initiated by Centrify. He can’t be arsed to link to it, so I will: It’s here. First of all, what’s the usual conclusion when someone talks about a survey, but doesn’t link to it? If you said “It means they’re pushing an agenda and are probably misstating the data, the interpretation, or both”, well, you’re probably right. Let’s see, hm? According to Matt:

Nearly half of all U.S. employees use at least one Apple device at work, but most of those gadgets lack common security protocols required by many enterprises, according to a new survey commissioned by Centrify, a company that sells enterprise security and management software for Apple products.

(my emphasis added)

According to the survey:

Santa Clara, CA — Centrify Corporation, the leader in securing identities from cyberthreats, today announced findings from a recent survey it commissioned to determine penetration and security compliance of Apple devices in the workplace. Conducted by Dimensional Research, the Centrify Apple survey demonstrates that while people widely use Apple devices for work, lack of security and management of those devices exposes companies to significant liabilities.

(my emphasis added again)

So by the end of his first paragraph, Matt’s already misstated what the survey said. The survey talked about a lack of security and management for those devices. There is a world, a world of difference between that, and Matt’s conclusiong that most Apple “gadgets”, (BY THE WAY…you catch that? Not “devices”, but “gadgets”. “Devices” are serious, “gadgets” are toys. Word choice matters kids, and Unca John catches that shit) lack common security protocols required by many enterprises. Matt’s pretty baldly implying, if not actually stating that you can’t properly configure and secure Apple devices…sorry, gadgets. Not that they aren’t, which is as we’ll see, what the Centrify survey is saying, but that they can’t. Big difference.

Next:

Last month, Centrify asked 1,004 business professionals about how they use computers and smartphones in the workplace. Respondents used a total of 1,309 Apple devices at work, including 191 Macs, 387 iPads and 731 iPhones, according to Centrify. All of the respondents were employed full-time at companies with at least 20 employees, from various industries including healthcare and financial services, according to Centrify

O RLY?

Of the total 2,249 U.S. workers surveyed, nearly half (45 percent) use at least one Apple device for work purposes.

NO! NOT RLY!

Look, when an author can’t be arsed to get basic, trivially verifiable facts contained in a survey correct, one must find not a grain, but a salt asteriod to apply to the rest of their conclusions. But since we’re knee-deep in the effluvia already, (SUNK TIME FALLACY IS NOT ALWAYS BAD) let’s keep wading:

The survey, which was conducted by Dimensional Research, found that 45 percent of respondents use at least one Apple device for work, to access corporate email, documents and business applications. Of those gadgets, 63 percent were employee-owned. More than half, or 51 percent, of all the users’ Apple devices were secured by single-word passwords or numerical PINs, and 58 percent of those devices had no software or policies to enforce the use of stronger passwords. The survey also found that 56 percent of Apple device users shared their passwords with others, and only 17 percent had company-supplied password managers.

Okay, that’s kind of lame, but that has nothing to do with Matt’s implication, that Apple devices lack “common security protocols”. In fact, you can specifically enforce stronger passwords in a variety of ways. From Apple’s Configuration Profile Reference, the “Passcode Policy Payload” section, you can set:

disabling simple passcodes

force the use of a PIN

set the max number of failed login attempts before the device is locked

set the max inactivity period before the device locks

set the passcode age period, aka “you must pick a new passcode every ndays”

Set the minimum number of complex characters a passcode must contain

Set the minimum length of the passcode

Require alphanumeric, not just numeric passcodes

Set the passcode history, up to remembering the last 50 passcodes

Set the max grace period, in minutes a phone can be locked without needing a passcode to unlock

Oh my, it looks like Apple “gadgets” do in fact support the “common security protocols” Matt thinks they don’t. (That is actually a subset of the overall security configuration options, and doesn’t even come close to what you can do on the Mac, but it suffices for our needs here.)

But Matt goes right on taking data that only shows people aren’t securing their devices properly, and using it to support his implication that you can’t:

In addition, only 28 percent of respondents’ Apple devices had company-provided device management solutions, and 35 percent of the people work for companies that enforce data encryption on Apple devices. Almost 60 percent of the Macs represented in the survey were used to access confidential company information, and 65 percent of those systems were used to access sensitive or regulated customer information, according to the survey.

And none of that, none. of. that. is because Apple keeps you from securing their computers and mobile devices. I’m sorry, “gadgets”. That’s people who don’t do it, for whatever the reason, but it’s not because you can’t do it, as implied by the title and Matt’s “common security protocols” nonsense.

Finally:

The results spotlight the high usage rates of unmanaged Apple devices in the workplace, according to Centrify, and they reinforce the risks organizations face when IT professionals don’t have the necessary resources to make sure devices comply with security policies.

And now we have Matt burying his own goddamned thesis. This is not a “can’t” issue, it’s a “don’t” issue, and the reasons behind it are about what we expect from bad CIOs (the kind that seem to love Matt’s sphinctorial musings): they don’t have the resources to manage the devices correctly.

Again, while not good, not Apple’s fault. Matt seems to like to push this kind of bullshit, and yet he keeps dumping it on the internet instead of into a garden. Such a waste.

Now I have one other issue to take here, but with a different author. Dan Moren, writing about this for Six Colors says:

So it’s always wise to ask yourself: where, exactly, do these stories come from?

Nearly half of all U.S. employees use at least one Apple device at work, but most of those gadgets lack common security protocols required by many enterprises, according to a new survey commissioned by Centrify, a company that sells enterprise security and management software for Apple products. [emphasis added]

Shocker.

Dan misses the mark here. Centrify’s survey didn’t say that, and I think he was maybe a bit lazy in not taking the time to actually read the survey. In fact, in the survey page, Centrify directly contradicts Matt’s implication:

“Centrify’s Apple survey spotlights the massive exposures that occur when devices do not comply with standard corporate security policies,” said Bill Man, chief product officer, Centrify. “In particular, customer data represents a huge liability. Disclosure of regulated information such as healthcare records could expose corporations to fines and other legal action. Most importantly, there are solutions on the market today that can handily secure Apple devices without sacrificing user productivity. It’s time for IT to take action.”

My emphasis added.

Centrify is not the one implying you can’t secure Apple devices correctly, that’s Matt’s idiocy. Centrify straight up says you can via a variety of methods, the problem is that people aren’t using existing resources. Dan, unlike Matt, should know better than this, and he knows how to find things like surveys, especially when they’re right there on the Centrify home page (at least that’s where I found it.)

Dan, stop being lazy, you don’t get to get away with that.

This is the second time that Matt Kapko, published by CIO.com has written something about Apple in the enterprise that is completely full of shit, to the point of being farcical, and he misstates a fairly obvious survey to do so.

It’s not just CEOs who do this

A long long time ago, (like eight years ago) in a galaxy (state) far, far away (the distance from Tallahassee to San Francisco), I was at one of Adobe’s buildings talking to the Flash team, or at least part of them. This was in the halcyon days when for some reason, people appeared to care what I thought about things. I didn’t really understand it then, nor do I now, but okay, it was at least a free lunch, and some time away from that year’s Macworld Expo. I think it was 2010, but I could be off by a year either way.

In any event, I’d been slating the Flash team, specifically one of their evangelists pretty hard, because to be honest, the guy liked to say stupid shit. I understand defending your product, and your work, and I support that, but there’s a difference between doing it intelligently and the way this guy was. For example, telling people that Flash worked great on mobile. No, it didn’t. It never did. And when asked for proof, he’d invariably say “well, the next update will.” “Mañana” as a defense?

At one point, Apple had done something minorly stupid, and he decided that meant that they were morally unfit, and was trying to position Adobe as some kind of moral high ground company. He was not pleased when I pointed out Adobe’s rather thorough rat-fucking of Microsoft during the Office 2007 release when they threatened to sue Microsoft over anti-trust issues because Office 2007 was going to have built-in PDF generation, and no one puts the money machine that is Acrobat in the corner. Of course, within weeks of Microsoft capitulating, Adobe released PDF as an open standard.

I’m not actually bagging on anyone here, it’s not like Microsoft is some land of pure thought and deed. But if you’re going to put yourself on a pedestal, make sure you know about all the corners of your basement.

So for whatever reason, that gets me this meeting. It was a very strange meeting. For one, I had a meeting with the Adobe CS Installer team a year or so earlier to compare it to, and that meeting had been splendid. The entire team was self-aware, and really wanted to make things better. That approach made the two days of meetings really good and fun. Also, Adobe has great food, if you ever get a chance to eat in their cafeteria at their world headquarters, do so.

This one was…odd. First, I’m not sure what their point was, not even to this day. At times, it seemed like they were lifting their skirts a bit, and that was interesting. But in a lot of ways, it was like they were trying to convince me, somehow, that I was wrong and Flash was awesome, especially the plugin. It was like they were marketing to me. As I worked for an advertising company at the time, this was not going to work well.

On the plus side, I think everyone there was smart and genuinely cared about Flash. None of them were “Bozos”. The engineers really impressed me, because they talked candidly about their side of things. Like how the Flash plugin on the Mac was really three plugins because the 4 major browsers of the time, (Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera) used three different graphics engines and Flash had to support them all. As they talked, I realized that the plugin was like a talking dog: be amazed it talks at all, stop fussing over its grammar.

But, that didn’t change the fact that the plugin sucked, from the user standpoint, and that Adobe had yet to show it running on mobile in a way that didn’t excessively drain battery life or run slow as hell. At one point, of course, they bring up Apple and I said something along the lines of “Look, you can shut Apple up by proving Apple wrong. Show a demo of the plugin running on iOS well, safely, not draining battery, not slow and crappy, but well.” They came back with various versions of “Apple won’t let us” and I pointed out that Apple couldn’t actually stop them. Now they couldn’t have gotten it into the store, but they could in fact, build it as an in-house project and use their enterprise dev setup to put it on devices they owned, and show that off.

They didn’t seem to get that? I mean, I’m not sure. I’m fairly articulate in person, and I was on solid factual ground, but it was like they didn’t want to hear any form of solution that wasn’t the one they wanted, namely Apple embracing Flash. This was so very weird, and started to explain a lot. I’ll note here this was coming from the PMs and the other non-engineers in the room.

Then we get into the future of Flash, and it went around a bit. I said “Look, you have a great set of dev tools, and if you keep moving it to support and generate HTML5/CSS (i think they’d just started this? Again, my timelines are based on potentially inaccurate memories), then you have something people will want to use. And there’s still a need for the plugin, because there’s still things HTML5/CSS can’t do, but you need to start planning for the Flash-Free future. Furthermore, the days of Flash owning the entire audience for cutting a rectangle-shaped hole in a web page and playing moving pictures and sound within that hole are ending. That writing is on the wall, in big neon letters. With sound. That says “THIS IS COMING TO AN ENNNND”. You really, really need to accept that now so when it does happen sooner than later, you’ll be ready for it.”

It was like I’d just spoke Rihannsu at them. They insisted I was wrong, and gave me reasons that sounded good, but had nothing to do with the reality that was actively, and loudly happening. It was the most curious thing to watch. I realized that they had convinced themselves that they were right, the Flash plugin was necessary for the internet, and anyone disagreeing was at best misguided, at worst, a troll. Or Steve Jobs.

I still don’t think any of them were bozos or stupid, although my opinion of them at the time was quite low. It was such willful denial and ignorance, I couldn’t believe it. But they had managed to allow their beliefs to overwhelm what the world was telling them, and so the situation with the Flash plugin today is absolutely unsurprising.

Never Go Full Klein Bottle

Pity the poor CIO. They must sit ‘pon their silicon throne, forever tasked, like Sisyphus himself, to deal with the endless sycophants from endless vendors bearing endless trays of silver, with the praise only a CIO’s gold can earn, delivered on endless bended knee. For this work, for this endless task, this shouldered boulder, forever in front of them, do they get even the slightest praise?

Never

On all sides, they are beset by base users and addle-pated “fellow” executives for whom nothing is ever enough. CIOs bless them with the fruit of their intellect and nigh-perfect judgement, shower them with Blackberrys and PCs and proper enterprise software that even includes the months of training needed for such acephalic ingrates to have even a chance of using it correctly, and what get they in return?

Venom

Pure unadulterated venom. The ingrates want “iPhones” and “Macs”. Their poor arms are too weak to bear the weight of two phones. “It’s inconvenient” they cry. They want software that is easy to use, as if enterprise developers are some form of mindless design monkey.

Sometimes, yea, even for CIOs, this behavior is so wearing that one can barely shake one’s jewelry from one’s box at the theatre when a galvanting jester makes a particularly titter-worthy bit of amusement. They ruin everything.

https://youtu.be/rvBCmY7wAAU?t=52s

(I really do love this. Lennon’s face is totes adorbs.)

Okay, that’s a little too sarcastic, even for me. In truth, most CIOs are not clueless gorps who can’t even be left on hillsides or ice floes because both wolves and orcas have standards.

Most of them, the vast majority are wicked smart. They know a lot, they have a lot of intellectual curiosity driving that intellect and they do a good job with what can be a Sisyphean task, namely balancing the needs of the boardroom, the datacenter, and everything in between, and they rarely do get the praise they and their staff earn. It is genuinely hard work, they do it well, and I’ve had the priviledge in my career of working for quite a few of the really good ones.

On the other hand…

The group I’m going to be talking about today are not in that set. First, for some background, read this…well, I’d like to call it tripe, but tripe has at least some use as a foodstuff: http://www.cio.com/article/2949540/macbook/cios-says-apple-still-doesnt-care-about-enterprise.html

Now, I was at that session. In fact, I told them, in answer to their displeasure with the lack of proper Apple support for businesses, that if one googles “Apple Enterprise Support”, the first hit is this one: https://www.apple.com/support/enterprise/, wherein one learns amazing facts. Like that you can in fact, buy “proper” enterprise support. One can do this on a per-incident basis, (around $400–600 per, I can never remember), or via yearly contract with three levels, Select, Preferred, or Alliance.

None of those are cheap, and in all fairness, Apple’s marketing of those things is…well, suck. It is teh suck. However, if one realizes that one’s business relies on a lot of product from a vendor, one might expect that one would put forth a little effort to find out what options are available beyond “take it to the store.”

Bless your heart if you thought that.

Here, from one of the panelists:

Aaron Gette, CIO of Bay Club, a lifestyle and fitness company, says he has never expected Apple to provide the level of direct support IT professionals are used to from traditional enterprise vendors. CIOs can successfully approach Apple in two ways, according to Gette. “One is the enterprise sales division, which is where they’re trying to sell you 10,000 iPads, and the other is leveraging the business team that’s in the [Apple] stores.” Gette has relied exclusively on the latter option throughout much of his career.

However you may feel about that statement, the…opinion…from the moderator of the panel, Maryfran Johnson, Editor-In-Chief of CIO Magazine that she found “…most technical people prefer Android” in a room full of sysadmins managing large numbers of Apple products and services is surely worse.

Not the worst. The prize for worst comment would have to be from Debra Jensen, CIO of Charlotte Russe, about how she works for a company comprised mostly of women, and as they’re very fashion concious, they love their little iPhones.

Really?

y’all may as well get comfy with this GIF, I kind of adore it too.

The sad thing is, I’m not really sure that’s the worst thing. Because both statements are stupid. There’s no way around that, both of those things are fundamentally stupid things to say. As was Maryfran Johnson, in an aside to Aaron Gette, saying that she thought Apple should be giving away Watches to members of country clubs, because…I guess dem rich folks deserve it?

To his credit, Aaron Gette had a look of “Um…yyyyyyes?”. I think he might have been praying for a metor about then. Or the Joker. (Note to Maryfran’s staff: try to remind her that maybe a room full of non-CIOs is not the best place for rich old whitey humor. Also, maybe try to not crap on the technical expertise of the entire room. She tried to get the audience to cheer her idea. The audience had other ideas.)

The entire panel was essentially up its own ass:

The CIO perspective on Apple hardware is changing regardless of how little assistance IT gets from Apple, according to Stuart Appley, CIO of the real estate firm Shorenstein. Appley says he wants to “get out of the business of saying no” to users who want to use Apple products, and he’s had to bulk up his own IT staff to fill in when Apple comes up short.

“Apple has never, at least until recently, embraced corporations and embraced the enterprise,” he says. “They’re a consumer-first company.”

Oh no, puddin’ had to train his people to manage his stuff. Jesus, did he not have an IT staff before? That can’t be, since one cannot “bulk up” what doesn’t exist. As well, I don’t know what kind of nonsensical mythos he’s trying to pull, but even in heavy, or complete Windows shops, you still have an IT staff. You still have people who need to be trained, or even “bulked up” when a new platform is introduced. Did they all magically know everything about Windows Vista/7/8/8.1 with no training at all? Appley having to deal with the basic reality of IT is not Apple’s fault.

As well, “Apple has never, until recently, embraced corporations…”? What the? Well, it makes more sense when you read this:

Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t play that game. When the company killed its Xserve enterprise server in late 2010, it “pretty much announced to the world that they didn’t care about the enterprise anymore,” Gette says.

Apple could design more enterprise-specific hardware or services to build relationships in the business world, but in most cases it simply doesn’t bother, according to Gette. A full five years after the first iPads began creeping into the workforce, little has changed for CIOs who want to support Macs and iOS devices, at least on Apple’s end.

Bullshit.

I’m sorry, but that is literally the only word that describes that. Bullshit. I’m sure Gette, indeed the entire panel and moderator believe it, believe it fervently. But popularity does not make bullshit into gold.

Again, I will absolutely agree that Apple’s communication with the SMB market and the enterprise is piss-poor, and they need to fix that. They’ve needed to fix that for years if not a decade or more. The Xserve really didn’t do much to make that better or worse.

But, a consumer OS doesn’t have support for AD, Kerberos, LDAP, Microsoft DFS shares, leading-edge versions of SMB, NFS, Fibre Channel, come with a SAN client, CAC cards, etc. Those are not things a “consumer” could give a fig for.

At one point, the panelists just veered into fantasy:

“Apple is so used to consumers, or they don’t care [about enterprise], because they don’t have to,” she says. “They’re thinking the consumers that then come to work for you will push so hard that you’ll end up going down that path.”

What these folks don’t, or really, won’t realize is that to Apple, they are not inherently important. As a good friend of mine said in the comment on the post:

CIOs often don’t realize that, to Apple, their business is no more important than the grandmother with an iPad. According to the Journal (citing quarterly numbers from Gartner and IDC) worldwide Q2 PCs are about 68.4 million; in that time Apple sold 61M iPhones and 12.6M iPads. I imagine it’s troubling to be confronted with a supplier for whom your business purchasing volume is the equivalent of couch change.

Pretty much. No one likes to find out they aren’t as important as the voices in their head say they are. As for this:

Jensen says IT wants to understand how to work with Apple to make its devices fit in their existing environments. “You want these companies to help you,” Jensen says. “If they want their devices to come into your space, they need to help you, and listen, and understand all the different things that has to play with it.”

From the same comment:

Further, it is ignominious to claim that Apple “doesn’t care about the enterprise”. A better statement would be that Apple doesn’t PRIORITIZE the enterprise. They do, in fact, work steadily to add features useful only to enterprise, and remove impediments that prevent enterprise adoption.

Why…WHY would Apple go through the trouble to create first MCX then Profiles and MDM for their products if they have no interest in the enterprise? (Also, spare me the “but that’s education” shtick. A k-12 school/district or a large university can have several thousand if not tens of thousands of computers and devices. That, dear friends is an enterprise, no matter how high you point your nose. It can be a very odd enterprise, but it is an enterprise. Also, Universities have no sympathy for your puling about BYOD. They’ve been living in that world for decades. Stop crying.) A consumer OS does not have an entire Directory Services team. A consumer device could care less about Exchange Active Sync. No, Apple is not going to build special hardware just for you, get over yourself.

But worry not dear friends, for I have the money shot quote:

None of the recent changes Apple made in the enterprise were born out of necessity. Almost everything Apple does for SMBs and their employees flows through its devices, applications and the platforms that power them. The company simply doesn’t have to appease CIOs directly, and it knows it. While support information is readily available for IT staff to review and follow, the entire process, from procurement to deployment and management, is generally self-serve, according to Jensen.

(Jensen should spend more time on the difference between Jensen’s head and Jensen’s nethers, Jensen appears to have some issues with differentiating them. )

This is what this is about. This, and only this, is why they keep banging that drum about “Apple Doesn’t Care About the Enterprise”: Because Mean Old Apple won’t appease them.

Apple won’t cut its throat on pricing for them, Apple won’t give them some roadmap that we all know is crap, (Seriously, what the hell is with grown-assed adults still believing in five-year roadmaps. It’s all crap, they know it’s all crap, but like the gorram tooth fairy, they still believe in it. You are not children, perhaps you should stop thinking like children), and Apple won’t show them stuff so they can have a bigger sekret knowledge peeny than the CIO next door. Apple won’t kiss their asses, and my friends, when you are dealing with this kind of CIO, there is nothing, NO-THING more unforgiveable than a vendor who will not plant lips to ass and tongue to rectum.

One last quote:

CIOs that can’t afford, or simply don’t need, 10,000 iPads would like their experiences with Apple to feel more like partnerships, but the reality is there’s little chance of that happening anytime soon.

Nonsense. But CIOs that demand vendors give them a handy with every PO are going to have a bad time with Apple. The rest (and thankfully, majority) of CIOs who are actually grown adults, not just pretending to be adults are going to have a much better time of it.

I sees you little drowsez, oh yes I sees you

Time For Punching

At some point in DDO, one has to stop dancing around and actually engage in combat. It is in fact, the most essential part of D&D: Kill Monsters, Take Shinies. Different classes do this better or worse than others, and different builds can create interesting extremes. For example, there are barbarian/bardbuckler builds that can do huge amounts of damage with a single hit, and there are tank builds, like my son’s warforged paladin that can barely be damaged by anything less than an extremely jacked-up storm giant or dragon, but watching him actually try to kill things is…well, I’m sure grass grows more slowly. Bamboo is definitely faster.

Character Background

So damaging/killing things as a Monk. First, again, this is my build. Different builds, or even different players with the same build can get different results. My build, currently, is an Aasimar Scourge (Race, the celestial version of a Tiefling) monk. I have 20 levels of monk and only monk. I’ve also 10 epic levels, and run in the Grandmaster of Flowers Epic Destiny (ED) with Paired Parrying (from Primal Avatar), Lithe (From Shadowdancer), Improved Combat Expertise (from Legendary Dreadnought) and Legendary Tactics (also from Legendary Dreadnought) “twisted” in. (Twists allow you to use a limited number of abilities from other Destinies. They are very handy.)

The first two improve my armor class, the third one decreases the amount of damage I take from physical attacks that hit, the last one increases the difficulty for enemies to avoid my tactical attacks, in particular Stunning Blow, Kukan-Do, Dire Charge, and Quivering Palm. The first three stun, the last kills. Kukan-Do is a long distance stun, so if I can see them, I can stun them. Dire Charge hits enemies in an arc between 120º and 180º. I am very, very good with the stunning. 

Reincarnations

I’ve done six full, aka true heroic, reincarnations, once to change my race to Half-Elf, the second to get to Shadar-Kai, the next three to Aasimar, and the final one to Aasimar scourge which added a +1 to my damage roll for the first three times I did it. Because I had one life as a Shadar-Kai, that got me a racial reincarnation feat that gave me a +1% to Dodge, and a permanent toggle stance where if I’m below 50% of my hit points, and I get hit, I get a 25% incorporeality effect for six second. Six seconds in combat is a long time. Each of my Aasimar past lives gives me a +1 to heal, or +3 in total, along with an extra point to Wisdom and a racial reincarnation point. As an Aasimar Scourge, I also get a +2 bonus to Wisdom, and given I’m a Wisdom build monk, an extra 3 points is always worth the effort.

I’ve done four epic reincarnations, aka ETRs, twice in the martial sphere, once in the primal sphere. (each ED has a sphere. There are 4 spheres: Martial, Primal, Arcane, and Divine.) My six heroic reincarnations add +3 to my damage rolls, my four ETRs add 11HP + healing 20+ points/minute (Primal) and 12 to my Armor Class (AC) along with +9% to my Doublestrike (explained later).

Feats

In terms of feats that directly affect damage:

Vorpal Strikes: on a Vorpal hit, (a Vorpal hit is a roll of 20 that is confirmed as a crit), if I’m fighting an opponent with a head, I behead and insta-kill them. If they’re really powerful, then I get an extra 100 points of damage. Obviously, this doesn’t work against things that don’t have a proper head, or non-vampire undead. This also adds slashing to my attack type, very handy with zombies.

Improved Martial Arts: Increases my damage multiplier by 1[W] when fighting “unarmed” (handwraps) and by .5[W] when using ki weapons, (quarterstaves, kamas, etc.)

Normal/Improved/Greater/Perfect Two Weapon Fighting: The first three remove all penalties for fighting with two weapons (handwraps), and increase my chances to hit with my “off” hand up to 80% Adds +5% to my doublestrike and +10% to my offhand doublestrike. Doublestrike allows two hits instead of one on a given attack. Doublestrike is good.

Epic Power: Adds + 3 to both Melee and Ranged Power per epic level. Since I’ve 10 epic levels, this adds 30 to each. I’ll explain melee/ranged power later.

Combat Expertise. While this is mostly used to enhance AC, it also decreases my chances to hit by 5.

Flurry of blows: This increases my attack bonus by +5, and also gives me a Base Attack Bonus (BAB, explained later) of 24 instead of 19, and adds 6% to my Dodge

Grandmaster of Forms: I run in Air Stance, which directly affects my health by decreasing my Constituion (CON) by two, but increasing my Dexterity (DEX) by 4, increasing my attack speed by 15%, and my doublestrike by 12%. (DEX helps with my Armor Class, and Doublestrike is my chances of hitting twice with each attack. Remember that previous feats basically guarantee that I’m going to hit with both hands. So boosting my doublestrike lets me hit 2-4 times per attack. What I lack in damage per hit, I make up in volume.)

Improved Critical: Bludgeoning Weapons: This includes unarmed (handwraps) and doubles my critical hit chance. Critical hits do double damage. Crits are good. Especially because if I roll a crit for an attack, and I get main hand doublestrike and off-hand doublestrike...crits are awesome.

Ki Strike: This adds the Adamantine, Lawful, and Magic types to my attacks, allowing me to bypass those types of damage reduction.

Quivering Palm: If the target fails its save (68-70 depending on stance), it dies. This has less Ki cost than Everything Is Nothing (30 vs. 50), and a decent DC, so I use the hell out of it.

Spring Attack: I take no penalty if I attack while moving. This is VERY HANDY FOR A MONK.

Stunning Fist: My favorite. If they fail their saving throw (99-101, Fortitude), they’re stunned for 5–6 seconds. I don’t fail often, and the relatively low Ki cost makes this something I use the hell out of. The cooldown time on this is short too, only 6 seconds.

Kukan-Do: Long distance stun, high DC (104-106). Ki cost is not bad, 25, so I spam the hell out of this. Way handy when trying to set up a target for a rogue with a high assassinate. Zap, stab, ded.

Dire Charger: an epic-level feat that stuns in an arc, does an attack with an extra +2 multiplier, has a high DC (104) and uses no Ki. Has a reasonably fast cooldown. 

Favored Enemy: Undead. Part of being an Aasimar Scourge, +2 to damage against undead.

Tactician: Epic Feat, gives my Stunning and related attacks a +2 to their DCs

Scion of the Astral Plane: +4 to Tactical Feat DCs (Stunning and related), +8 to Doublestrike, +4% to both Dodge and Max Dodge, and +4 to reflex saves.

Unarmed Strike: as a monk, if I’m using handwraps, this increases my damage multipler by 3.5[W]. Also, rather than doing damage based on 1d2 or 1d3, my damage starts at 1d6 and at my level is 1d8.

Whirlwind Attack: Lets me hit 4 times (on average) in just under a second, and increases my damage multiplier by 4[W]. This has a short cooldown (5 sec) and uses no Ki. TRIPLE WORD SCORE.

Enhancements

Enhancements can come from several trees. My racial tree is Aasimar Scourge. I don’t have many enhancements from that other than maxing out my healing hands (7 uses, regens every 3 minutes) and my Wisdom bonus (extra +2). I also have Improved Scourge Weapons, which gives me +5% to Doublestrike (sensing the theme here?) and oversize Two Weapon Fighting which is not really that useful to me. Finally, there’s Divine Purpose: Scourge which when activated adds 3d6 Light Damage per attack that scales with Melee Power. On a vorpal, enemies are blinded. Very handy against undead.

In terms of class enhancements, I pick mostly from the Shintao tree, but some from Henshin Mystic as well. In terms of Henshin Mystic:

Riddle of Fire: Gives me a +5 to Fire and Force Spell Power, and +1% to Spell Critical Chance for Fire and Force. I do both of those kinds of damage pretty much every hit, so though small boosts, they’re welcome. Gives me a +3 to my Physical Resistance Rating (PRR) and my Melee Power.

Ki Bolt: a LONG distance bolt that does 1d6 fire and 1d6 force damage per Monk Level to the target and scales at 3X my Melee Power. Also gives me a +10 to Melee Power, a +2 to fire resistance, and a +3 to PRR

Sounding Staff: mostly adds to attacks made with a quarterstaff, which I never use. But adds another +10 to Melee Power, a +2 to fire resistance, and a +3 to PRR.

Incinerating Wave: Great Name and a wall of Ki Flame (PURPLE FIRE) that travels well, until it hits something like a wall. Does 5d6 for fire and force each, +1 additional point of fire and force damage per second to nearby enemies. It moves way slow, so that’s actually useful, and damage scales at 3X Melee Power. Adds another +10 to Melee Power, a +2 to fire resistance, and a +3 to PRR.

Cauldron of Flame: God I love this one. First, it works through walls/gates/doors/walls of force. It’s a big circle that cooks things. Like Cooks them at 1d2 fire damage per monk level every two seconds increasing an additional 1d2 per monk level every two seconds for 30 seconds and scales at 2X melee power. I’ve seen it hit for 2000 pts the last couple hits. Also, while I’m inside it, I gain +20 PRR, +10 Magical Resistance Rating (MRR) and a +15% to Dodge that ignores my max dodge cap. Oh, and +10 to Melee Power, a +2 to fire resistance, and lowers enemy fire resistance by 2. LOVE THIS.

Mystic Training: Adds +3 to the DC, or roll the enemy has to make to avoid my monk finishing moves. Regularly handy.

Way of the Patient Tortise: increases my Concentration by four, which increases my Ki and gives me an extra 20 hit points.

Contemplation: +3 to Concentration, and Passive Ki Generation is increased by one.

Wisdom: Increases my WIS by 1.

Constitution: Increases my CON by 1

Lighting the Candle: this does more damage per hit, but cripples my Ki Generation per hit from 4 down to 1. So I never use it. I only took two points in it because I needed to take two points in something in the tree.

Embrace the Void: Lets me regenerate more Ki faster when meditating, and adds +3 to my Dodge cap.

Focus: gives me and nearby party members a +10 bonus to Universal Spell Power, a +5 bonus to hit, and a +5 bonus to Melee and Ranged Power.

From Shintao:

Protection from Tainted Creatures. I gain the Byeshk damage trait to my unarmed attacks, used against Aberrations and a +1 to Armor Class and +1 to all saving throws

Iron Hand: I gain the Cold Iron damage trait, useful against Demons and Fey.

Argent Fist: I gain the Silver damage trait, useful against Devils and Vampires, and a +1 to Armor Class and +1 to all saving throws

Touch the Void Dragon: a 30-second 1d4+1 (2-5) to all ability scores including WIS, a +5 to Melee Power, and a +1 to my damage multiplier when using handwraps

To Seek Perfection: +4 to my WIS, +15 to Melee Power, +1 to Armor Class, +1 to saving throws, to my damage multiplier when using handwraps.

Deft Strikes: +10% to my offhand attack chances while unarmed

Conditioning: +3 to Concentration, fortitude saves, and a +15 to HP

Fist of Iron: when used, adds a 3[W] to my damage multiplier, increases my critical chance by 1 and the critical hit multiplier by +1 (if I happen to get a crit when I use it.)

Smite Tainted Creature: When used against “tainted” creatures (Aberrations, Undead, and Chaotic Extraplanar), I get 2X my WIS modifier (18) to my attack roll, and a damage bonus equal to my monk level. If I get a vorpal attack, the target is locked in a Jade Tomb, (they turn a very pretty shade of green and can’t move.)

Jade Strike: When used against “tainted” creatures, if they don’t make their save (104), they are 10% more vulnerable to physical attack and lose 25% of their fortification. On a critical hit, they get Jade Tombed.

Tomb of Jade: When used against “tainted” creatures, if they fail their save (104), they are locked in a tomb of jade.

Wisdom: Increases my WIS by 1.

Constitution: Increases my CON by 1

Rise of the Phoenix: If I’m killed, once per rest I can ressurect myself.

Empty Hand Mastery: adds a +1 to my critical hit range

Meditation of War: this adds a bonus depending on stance. In Air, I get another 10% chance to off-hand attacks, and a +2 to hit. By the time you add it all up, I basically can’t miss with offhand, and the least amount of times I can hit anything is twice. 3-4x is normal. It’s handy.

In terms of Skills, the only one that applies really is Concentration which directly affects Ki. Mine is 86. At one point I had it up to 104, but I’ve yet to notice a difference, since I use it to power Ki, not help cast spells in combat. My normal resting Ki is 289, and my max is 510, and i generate Ki constantly. 

Epic Destiny Bonuses

My normal Epic Destiny is Grandmaster of Flowers (GMoF), which gives me:

Inner Focus: Lets me instantly restore 25–125 Ki every three minutes, adds 10 to my maximum Ki for every level of GMoF I have. Also, I get +4 Melee Power for every level of GMoF.

Centered Mind: +1 to the roll to save against my tactical feats. Like Stunning Fist.

The Abiding Path: +1 to the roll to save against my tactical feats.

Balance in All Things: +1 to passive Ki Generation, +1 to the roll to save against my tactical feats, and makes me basically immune to knockdown. Handy when someone’s spamming Grease outside a quest.

Lily Petal: Ranged attack, fairly long range. I fire a bolt of Ki energy that does 80–120 points of damage + 8–12 points per character level. There’s no save, and it does damage where a lot of attacks won’t. No really, I killed a dragon with it when the raid borked. It was the only kind of damage that worked.

Enlightenment: +45 Ki, + 6 concentration, and +1 to Passive Ki generation.

A Dance of Flowers: +1.5[W] to my attacks.

Hail of Blows: +3% to Doublestrike

Orchid Blossom: same damage as per Lily Petal, except this is a small area of effect (AOE) attack. The target(s) can save for half damage, or evade for no damage. That happens a lot, so it’s not one of my favorites.

Piercing Clarity: Bypass 10% of enemy fortification, and I can hit incorporeal creatures.

Drifting Lotus: an AOE attack centered on me. Decent radius, about 3m from what I can tell. Does 100–160 points of damage + 10–14 points per character level. If the target fails their save, (73 Reflex), they’re knocked down. That is very reliable. Either effect can be evaded, and the damage can be halved if they make their reflex throw. Hand when sneaking as this doesn’t break sneak. Also works in public areas for some reason.

Everything is Nothing, aka EIN, the Room Cleaner, the Blue Screen of Death, the Blue Light Special: every time I do a Lily Petal, Orchid Blossom, Drifting Lotus, Quivering Palm or Stunning Fist against an actual enemy, I increment my Perfect Peace Counter. Once I get to 25 I can land an EIN. With EIN, if the target is a non-boss, and fails their saving throw, (73-75 Will and/or Fortitude), they’re erased from existence. Not just dead but gone. This thing has a radius of something like 20–30 meters, so it can clear a room with ease. If they make their save, then they are paralyzed for six seconds and take 500–1550 points of damage. The description says 1000, with a fortitude save for half, but in actual play, that’s what I’ve seen. If run against a red- or purple-named boss, all they do is take the damage six seconds later. I like this one. A lot. Has a five-minute cooldown.

Stats

In terms of Stats, the main ones for my character are WIS, Constitution, (CON) and Dexterity (DEX). Of those, WIS is the directly important one, as it affects my monk abilities the most. My WIS is 77 in Air stance and 81 in Water stance which gives me a bonus of 33-35. My DEX, which affects ranged attacks, is 50, for a bonus of 20. (your bonus goes up by 1 every two levels of stat starting at about 10.) My CON is 65 for a bonus of 16, and this affects my Concentration. The other one that affects attack/damage the most is Strength, (STR.) My STR is okay, only 47, for a bonus of 18. That affects both attack and damage rolls.

Ship Buffs

Ship buffs come from both guild level and your guild airship. By purchasing buffs, you can gain a lot in terms of damage, AC, ability scores, etc. In terms of attack, I have:

Ninja Assassin, which gives me a .25[W] multiplier and a +6 to damage when flanking.

Game Hunter: +5% damage to helpless foes, (which is why I love Stunning Fist so much.)

Floating Rock Garden: +2 to STR and WIS.

Forbidden Library: +3 to Concentration.

Paradoxical Puzzle Box: +2 to DEX.

Trapsmith’s Workshop: Bypass 5% of enemy fortification. (Good for landing Critical Hits, which fortification stops.)

Tactical Training Room: +6 damage on critical hits (before applying multiplier), and +2 to hit with physical attacks.

Grandmaster’s Dojo: +1 to my Stunning Fist DC.

Weapon Dice Multiplier

The Weapon Dice Multipler, or [W] is applied to the basic weapon damage. So in my case, I have a normal WDM of 14.8[1d6]. This is applied before any other enhancements or critical hit multipliers. So, this means that on any given hit, this multiplier is going to let me get between 14.8 and 88.8 points of damage per hit instead of 1 to 6 points. If there’s an Artificer in the party who casts Deadly Weapon, that increases my WDM to 15.8[1d6] which means 15.8 to 94.8 points per hit. Kind of handy, especially as fast as I hit.

Melee/Ranged Power

This is used to further increase the amount ot damage a weapon/attack can do. The basic formulat is (100+MP or RP rating)/100. I mostly melee, so I rely on my MP rating of 151, which increases my damage by a multiplier of 2.51 So, if on a hit, I do 100pts of damage on a given attack, that is multiplied by 2.51 so I would actually do 251 points of damage. This is applied to straight damage, with some static effects from enhancements, only a small number of which apply to me, so it’s pretty much always 2.51 Still, that’s not bad, takes me from 14.8 and 88.8 points per hit to 37.1–222.89 points per hit.

Base Attack Bonus

This is both important and complicated. It’s a number that is added to every attack, including unarmed/bare handed. It determines the number of attacks in your attack sequence, and determines your attack speed. For melee weapons, this increases at a BAB of 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25. Mine being 24, I cry a lot. As a monk with the flurry of blows feat, I start with a BAB of 1 (instead of .75, important, because BAB always rounds down), and increase by 1 every level.

The attack sequence is important is it is the chain of attacks your character performs. As long as you keep attacking, the sequence is not broken, and you cycle through the chain. If you stop attacking for too long, then you drop back to the start. In my case, since I have two weapon fighting, and a BAB of 24, I’m going to have a bonus of: +22, +22, +27, +32. (This is a bit of speculation. The charts I can find only go up to a BAB of 20, so I’m assuming it follows the progression beyond 20. If not, then it’s: +18, +18, +23, +28.)

BAB is also affected by Two Weapon Fighting, or TWF. As I have Greater TWF, and a number of other enhancements, I’m going to also hit with my other hand 100% of the time. If I’m in Wind stance, thanks to my Meditations of War enhancement, that increases to 110%. So I always get an additional off-hand attack for my main hand attack.

Finally, BAB affects attack speed. I currently have a melee attack speed bonus of 15%. There’s a number of charts available on this, but in my measurements, (using the training dummy on my airship and how many attacks I see floating on screen) my build is currently running 4–6 attacks per second in Water stance and 8-10 in Air stance. So depending on stance, I do 249–360 to 480–600 attacks per minute depending on stance and how the off hand/doublestrike attacks kick in. “Buzzsaw” is a good word for it. (Keep in mind that a high end raid boss can have 5 *million* hit points. This is not some unbalanced thing.)

Doublestrike

Doublestrike is different from offhand attack, in that it’s the chance for an additional attack with your main hand attack. My current doublestrike is 75%, which is really good. And in Reaper-level dungeons, I can boost that to 105%. So, if everything hits (or procs in ddo-speak) right, on a single attack, I can hit 4 times. Again, given how fast I attack, that can add up real fast.

Helpless Enemy

So given my love of Stunning Fist, and the reliability with which I can use it, it’s well worth mentioning this. By default, a helpless enemy takes 50% additional damage. In my case, 55% because of my ship buff. So now, if we take my previous standard minimum attack of 37.1–222.89, against a helpless enemy, that turns into 57.5–354.8 pts per hit. Again, I hit really fast.

Critical/Vorpal Hits & Damage

Since I’ve mentioned this a few times, let’s look at it. A critical hit is defined as:

If you hit your target while getting a (non-modified) d20 roll within your weapon’s threat range, this results in a critical threat (even if your modified attack roll wouldn’t beat the opponent’s AC).

A critical threat means you have a chance to score a critical hit. To do so, a confirmation roll is made, with the same to-hit bonus being applied (plus extra confirmation bonuses such as Seeker, Kensei enhancements, Fighter Critical Accuracy, etc.); in this roll, 1's do not automatically fail to hit. This roll must beat the target’s AC in order to “confirm” the critical hit.

In DDO, a confirmation roll can still succeed on a roll of 1; it does not auto-miss on such a roll.

If that roll also results in a hit against the target’s AC, the critical hit is confirmed, and the base damage is rolled once for every critical hit multiplier. If the confirmation roll is a miss, then the attack is not a critical hit and is rolled as a normal attack (IE, auto-success on natural 20 or test vs. AC for non-20).

So what’s this mean for me? Well, my normal critical threat is a 20, since I fight unarmed. At least that’s what it should be, but according to my inventory screen, it’s actually 18–20. So when attacking if I roll a 18 or a 20, I get a critical threat. There’s then a secondary roll that is a standard to hit roll, affected by many bonuses including seeker. If I make that roll, then I have a confirmed critical hit, and the damage is multiplied by 2 in my case, but that multiplier is applied last after the various standard bonuses and seeker bonuses are applied. So I can get 700+ points on a good crit. Note, this is basic damage. I’m not yet including gear damage.

Vorpal strikes are similar to a crit, but they only happen on a natural 20 with a confirmation roll. If that hits, then if the target has fewer than 1000 hit points (1500 for Improved Vorpal) and they are not a:

Red-named or purple-named boss

Non-vampire undead

Non-warforged (or bladeforged I’d guess) construct

Beholder

Ooze

Under a Deathblock or Death Ward spell

You snick off their head and they are instantly dead. Kind of fun.

Equipment Contributions

Let us not forget the contributions gear brings to the table. My main weapons are a set of Sentient Storm’s Harness handwraps:

Overpowered? Naaaaah

Going down the list, the increased weapon die damage is a 4.8[w] which is how I get to 14.8[w].

Ghost Touch: Yeah, nice try spectres and ghosts. I’m hitting you anyway

Rubies of good and chaos: these are there to break DR (damage resistance). I’ve another set of Storm’s Harness that has Good and Evil. 

Shocking Blast: on a vorpal, add in 120-1440 points of electrical damage. Very few things resist electrical. 

Shocking Burst: 1d6 electrical damage per hit, and an additional 3d10 on a critical hit.

Greater Reinforced Fists: helps me get to that 14.8[w] I love so much.

Shocking: 12-72 electrical damage per hit.

Sentient Filligrees: adds all kinds of bonuses as you see there. Also means th weapon talks at random. Since this one has “The Hopeful”, it’s like having an overly perky 16-year-old barista in your weapons. She’s fun though. Sometimes creepy. But mostly funny. Especially when I get a really good crit and I hear her yelling “WOOO-HOO!!”.

But that’s just the weapons. I have a number of items that do passive damage, or increase my damage output. First, my goggles, Visions of Precision which give me Enhanced Ki +3 and Dazing X: 

again, one of those rare items made for monks

Normally, when I punch, I get one Ki point per hit. Now, with my punching speed, that adds up fast. But with Enhanced Ki, I get an additional 3 points per hit. So I can max out my Ki bar in a matter of seconds. Given how much I spam Ki-Powered attacks, that’s critical. Dazing X not only drains my target’s Will save by up to 5 points, but also increases my Stunning fist and similar by 15. In and of itself, the Will drain does nothing for Stunning Fist, that’s a Fortitude save. But Kukan Do, Tomb of Jade, and Dismissing Strike are Will Save attacks, so that’s handy. 

Next are my bracers, Legendary Lore-Fueled Packbanner, which while nominally more aimed at Druids, have a number of features I rather like:

The main things here are the Green (Agument) slot and the Insightful Doublestrike. The Sapphire of Crushing Wave Guard has a 5% Chance of 3 ticks of 30-40 Cold and 30-40 Bludgeon Damage over 6 seconds (180-240 damage, 210 average), and that applies when I’m hitting or hit. Again, hitting speed is high. So that’s convenient, and I’m all about the Doublestrike boosts.

Next up is one of my favorite rings with yet another Sapphire of Crushing Wave Guard, the Ward Token:

So, multiple augments of the same kind like this don’t stack, that is, two don’t give you a 10% chance. But, each chance is calculated independently of each other, so the effect is similar to stacking. 

My boots, Legendary Shadow’s Footsteps, have both a Doublestrike boost, (12%) and Distant Diversion, which lowers the aggro or hate I generate in ranged combat by 31%. I don’t really do a lot of ranged, so that’s not that important:

My other ring is a Legendary Five Rings that I crafted by farming the crap out of the “Slavers” trilogy, a classic set of modules that Standing Stone Games imported into DDO: 

The two main things here are the massive Stunning boost, +20, and a boost to Deadly, which adds +14 to the “base” damage of my attacks. That then gets run through all the multipliers, w00t!

My belt is also crafted from the Slavers chain:

The only direct attack affecting thing here is the +28 to Accuracy. I rarely miss. Another Doublestrike (I really, really use that thing) bonus is from my cloak, Legendary Mantle of Fury, which as you can see, gives me a +22% to Doublestrike:

My trinket (beats me, it’s different from a necklace) is Echo of the Icon, whose main boost is a serious Strength boost, +20:

That gives me an extra +10 bonus to my To Hit and Damage. So that’s a big one.

The End Results

So what’s it all mean?

Well, in basic terms, my damage setup looks like this:

I literally do over 200/300 pts per hit, and if I get a chain going, which I usually do, that can increase to 400+ before i get any kind of weapon effect bonus. At my hit speed, that’s kind of ridiculous.

I basically bypass any material damage reduction (DR) other than Crystal. In terms of physical attacks, I bypass everything but piercing. I bypass Good and Chaos in terms of aligned damage. In addition to physical attack speeds, (which we’ll see in a second), I can do around 400 or so points of damage via Lily Petal every 6 seconds, I can run Orchid Blossom every 12, and Drifting Lotus every 15. The first and third of those I run the most. The knockdown is really handy.

Every 6 seconds, Stunning Fist. With a Fortitude save of ~100, it rarely misses. It can’t stun as many things as some of the better shield stunners, but it’s more reliable, and hits more often. 5X more often than Stunning Shield. Which then gives me an extra 55% of damage to whomever I’ve stunned. (Which is anything but Red/Purple named bosses, non warforged/bladeforged constructs, elementals or undead.) 

Every 15 seconds, Kukan-Do, it has a higher DC than Stunning fist and works at any distance that I can target someone at. It’s very handy when I have a heavy hitter some distance away and I don’t want to get wrecked before I can get within melee range. 

Every 12 seconds, Dire Charge, has a DC about that of Kukan-Do and affects enemies in an arc. Also uses zero Ki. 

Every 60 seconds, Tomb of Jade. High DC like Kukan-Do. Now, only being able to use it for a minute doesn’t sound really handy, but it rarely misses, it lasts for 30 seconds instead of six, like the various stunning feats, and works on stuff that can’t be stunned, like undead, blobs, etc. 

Every 25 seconds, Drifting Lotus, seen below. It has a decent chance to knock enemies down and do a fair bit of damage. Also, I can start it fairly far away, mid jump, so I land just as it goes off and then can jump away. Really good for high-level mobs:

Every 5 seconds, Whirlwind attack, which hits everything around me multiple times for more damage than a normal attack, uses no ki, and can proc criticals and vorpals.

So again, I’m hitting 8-10 times a second, and with my normal gear, that’s between 200-400+ points per hit. So 1600-4000 points of damage per second. Multiply that by 55% for helpless targets. Criticals/Vorpals do 1500-2500 points, and I get those fairly regularly given my attack speed.

I do quite well in a fight. I tend to have high kill counts, I mean, not like a good Wizard or Warlock, but I can keep up with them and occasionally beat them. On one run of the Double Dragon raid, I had...240 kills out of 300 total. Since I don’t generate a lot of aggro, I can also attack a high-powered boss for longer without becoming their New Friend.