The InnBetween

Q. How exactly do vaccines work if they don't prevent a virus from entering your body?

A. OK, so do you ever watch those cop dramas on TV? They do a bunch of research, figure out who the bad guy is, and then “put out a BOLO” to find the bad guy?

That’s kind of what a vaccine is.

It’s the Wanted poster that they give to the cops (which is your immune system) so that they know what the bad guy looks like, so that when they run into the bad guy, they recognize him and take him out. It’s also the specialist that comes in and trains the locals on how to deal with this particular bad guy.

A vaccine “trains” your own immune system to recognize the virus. Usually, the immune system can only learn what a virus “looks” like by actually coming in contact with a virus. But since they won’t know it’s a “bad guy” until it does “bad guy” stuff, that gives the virus time to run around doing damage before the immune system a) figures out that it’s the bad guy and b) calls in all the troops for the manhunt.

This is bad. This is reactive. This necessarily requires damage to the body first. And a lot of time, the damage can be too extensive to repair, or it can kill you before your immune system has the time to mount an effective response. Or worse, the damage is to the immune system itself, preventing any defense of any illness at all.

So a vaccine delivers something that *looks* like the virus but doesn’t do any damage. A mock-up, a model, a training dummy. That way, the immune system learns to recognize it first, and it rallies the troops immediately and has them on standby, ready to go, before the virus ever enters the system. So when the virus DOES finally enter (if it does), the SWAT team is right there, already geared up and trained on this guy’s specific tactics.

There may still be a firefight. The bad guy might still win. But it’s WAY WAY WAY less likely if all systems are on alert and geared up and waiting to ambush the virus, rather than allowing the virus the opportunity to sneak in and start sabotaging stuff without the immune system knowing about it.

Vaccines are the warning poster, the BOLO, the call to action, telling your own body that there is an imminent threat on the horizon, go to DEFCON 5, batten down the hatches, and get ready for war. Then your own body does what it can to prepare itself based on the information it’s given in the warning poster / vaccine.

With enough warning and the proper information, our bodies can usually mount an effective defense, but it’s still gonna be a fight and some people are immunocompromised (meaning that their body doesn’t have, like, a functional SWAT team, they have a dinky little rural sheriff’s office with 2 deputies and a couple of shotguns and that’s it). So it’s really important that all the surrounding towns (people) mount a good defense, that way the virus never even makes it into the county and the people with the little rural immune systems never have to take on the big fight that they can’t even hope to win. And if enough counties have enough towns on alert, we remove all the possible places that the bad guy can go to ground and hide, and if it can’t go anyway, it dies out.

A. Well, I never really kept track of all the kills I’ve had, so I don’t have an exact number, but as far as I know, most of my partners think it’s pretty hot that I can provide fresh meat for the family in the event of an apocalypse and can likely transfer that skill to defense of the commune during said apocalypse in the event of human raiders.

Other than that, though, my body count doesn’t really have any affect on my relationships. Strangely, being an accomplished hunter has very little to do with what kind of romantic partner I make.

Deliberately missing the point to make a point:

Q. Is it bad to sleep with more than one person?

A. I have 2 sleep disorders that makes sleeping in general challenging. I am frequently sleep deprived, which affects my daytime performance at pretty much everything. I have trouble sleeping by myself. Adding one other person to the bed means I pretty much don’t sleep the whole night. Sleeping with more than one person? Fucking forget it.

I was once part of a polycule who insisted on all 6 of us co-sleeping (even though we were not all involved with each other). In one house, they bought 3 twin beds and ratchet-strapped them together to make one giant bed, along with this foam doohickey that got wedged between the mattresses so that nobody slept “in the crack”. In another house, they put 2 queen mattresses together on the floor.

Between the snoring and the shifting and everyone having different sleep schedules and the occasional sex, I literally could not sleep, as opposed to my hyperbole above where I said I “pretty much” don’t sleep. Even with headphones and sleeping on the very end of the bed so that I was only next to one person, it was torture. The only thing that didn’t suck was that everyone had our own sheets and blankets.

It was so bad sharing a room with 5 other people (and a dog and a cat) that I just started sleeping on the floor of the spare room (which did not have a bed) when I stayed over. And I started making excuses to not stay over as often.

Studies also show that co-sleeping has a tendency to interfere with most people’s sleep. I know that a lot of people seem to feel, emotionally, that they sleep better with a significant other, but sleep studies suggest otherwise. But people seem to survive military barracks, so it’s apparently not going to kill you.

It means you're asking some internet rando or a middling-intelligent IRL rando to literally become a college professor and compress a whole semester's worth of content into one discussion with a particularly obnoxious older student who talks back and thinks he knows more than the professor.

One's ability to explain a subject is not necessarily related to the validity of that subject.

Unfortunately, this can also be used to defend legitimately invalid subjects. The inability of a crank to explain their magical quantum superflux that will upend all of physics IS how that subject is invalid.

But teaching is its own skill. And debate is its own skill. And getting through people's biases is its own skill. And these 3 things are not the same skills. A subject can be true and factual and valid and a person can understand enough of the subject to have formed an opinion on it but not have the skills to teach it properly, especially to someone who is motivated to disbelieve it.

Also, someone's failure to explain something to your satisfaction could also mean that they just don't think you're worth their time and effort anymore.

I don’t care how “spiritual” you think you are, the “perfect” gift will not just “materialize” for you. To be a good partner, you have to do the work. It’s not magic. Only communication with this person will provide the answer.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “WHAT WOMEN WANT”!!!! Or men. Or any demographic. Unless the demographic is specifically “people who want this thing”. Absolutely never ask a random woman (or even a non-random woman you know) what makes a good gift “for a woman”. If she doesn’t say “depends on the woman”, she is fucking wrong, full stop. Replace demographic and pronouns as needed.

Absolutely no goddamn grand gestures. If your very specific partner likes them, then you should already know that before you do it and without asking other people for advice about it. If you don’t know for sure that this specific person wants this specific grand gesture, then the answer is no goddamn grand gestures.

And you KNOW that I can't talk about Sinners without discussing the dancing! There are a lot of conversations going on about the music, and I'm sure I'll be sharing those discussions at some point. But so far I haven't seen much on the dancing.

And the dancing NEEDS its own conversation. Once the movie hits streaming, I'm hoping there will be more videos talking about, not just the dancing in this one scene, but the blocking and composition throughout the whole film, and hopefully showing the scenes that they're referencing. Because even having seen the movie, discussion of the dancing without a visual play-by-play really doesn't quite do it justice.

Just a note, though - the black origins of lindy hop are quite well known in the dance community. Frankie Manning was even still teaching practically right up until the day he died in 2009 and Norma Miller was still attending dance events nearly until her own death in 2019, right here in Florida.

I know several dancers who not only took lessons from Frankie himself, but had the opportunity to hang out with him socially. I, personally, went to visit the site of the old Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, where lindy hop was born.

If you're like me, and you can tell just by the sophisticated storytelling of #Sinners that there were layers and layers of stuff in there, but maybe you don't have exposure to some of the references in the film, so you could *feel* that something was significant but not necessarily why or how or about what, here's a starting video that discusses a few of the top-layer references and subtext in the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWmaNw86dyk

Him: [promptly invites Andrew Tate back in]

Him: [kicks out hardworking, tax-contributing non-criminals]

Him: [opens floodgates for white Afrikkaners to "escape" here]

Because #FashionIsPolitical

ChatGPT: [insert Jason Statham’s filmography]

Influencer: [pours half a bottle of oil and a pound of butter over the vegetable, then covers them in white bread crumbs and lets them bake while sitting in all that fatty liquid and empty starch]

I watched the movie Idiocracy when it first came out. It was ok. I'm not particularly a fan of the accusations that have been going on for 20 years now that we are headed for that ridiculous satire.

But then I watched the Legal Eagle review of Idiocracy.

Made during F'Elon 47's first reign of terror.