Online handle tip for colored grapheme synesthetes.
You’ll see a lot of online handles (usernames, I guess is what most people call them -- handle is a holdover from the BBS days I grew up in) with numbers after them because the word or combination of words or name or whatever was already taken.
I’ve never been good at choosing that kind of name, when I’ve wanted one, but now I’ve found a simple trick. This only works if you have both colored letters and colored numerals -- or some other synesthetic trait tied to letters and numbers where the two can be easily compared. But I’m going to describe this in terms of color because that’s how mine works.
Take the word that I wanted to start with.
Look at the colors of each letter in the word (or the whole word, if you want to go that way and if the color is different for whole words -- but it’s easier with individual letters).
Then, for each letter, choose the closest match in numbers to that color. It doesn’t have to be an exact match. Just the closest match you can find. If there’s no possible even remotely close match, skip that letter (or use an underscore or dash or some other symbol you’ve chosen to represent a blank spot) and keep going.
A is blue, M is red, E is green, L is transparent-ish (but has weird properties with regards to the letters it’s next to in a word, sometimes), I is white, A is blue.
That’s all the detail you need -- there are far fewer numbers than letters, so you want the possibilities as broad as possible, even though you of course will have specific shades of each color in mind, and possibly properties like shininess roughness and personality and etc.
0 is black, 1 is white, 2 is yellow, 3 is red, 4 is blue, 5 is sort of an olive brown(1), 6 is orangish brownish but more on the orange side of things, 7 is on the slightly more blue side of a medium-light purple/lavender, 8 is green (a hard one to pin down because it glows and things like that always throw me off), 9 is another reddish-orangeish-brown but more on the brown side this time, and that’s all the numerals.
So then your handle can be amelia43814 or something like amelia438_14 depending on your preference -- and you will have a much easier time remembering it than you would some random number. Never mind that the red of M is more a dark brick-red and the red of C is more a brighter candy-red -- they’re still similar enough that they’re easy for me to remember as going together. So you’re far less likely to forget such a username than you would if you used random numbers, and you don’t have to reveal any personal information like birth year unless you want to (a lot of people I’ve noticed, have online handles like Ashley1983 -- if you don’t want the entire world to instantly know your age without even asking, that may not be the best choice).
And again, if letters and numbers have some attribute other than color that you’re capable of using instead, go for it. It’s just colors are the most common form of conceptual grapheme-related synesthesia (personality and visual texture, I’d imagine, would be close behind).
(1) I’ve gotten in trouble for saying “olive green” and “dog turd brown” to describe the same color, the color of five -- someone decided I must be lying(2), even though I’ve taken part in synesthesia genetics research that requires you pass tests proving it’s real synesthesia.
But to me those are two shades of the same color, and someone had once described a color within that shade-system for me as “olive green” so I just assumed such a description would apply to all colors in that area, which include certain greens, browns, dark yellows, and dark beiges. Also there are olives and dog turds that definitely share the same colors -- both in areas considered green and areas considered brown.
My having my own designations for where colors cut off is sort of like my having my own designations for different types of pain, some of which I would never imagine could all be under the same umbrella-wod “pain”, some of which I would never imagine other people see as separate. Where people draw distinctions between certain sensory experiences can be both cultural and personal. My mother has certain turquoise-like shades where she never knows whether to say it’s blue or green, not because she can’t tell the various shades apart (both she and I have passed with 100% accuracy a very hard test of differentiating minute differences in color, so we obviously didn’t catch the colorblindness that runs in the family) but because she divides up the borders of certain colors in a way that is unique to her.
(2) This person was bent out of shape about me for all kinds of reasons, some better than others, but I can’t stand people who, instead of being honest and saying “I just don’t like you,” instead habitually try to pick at and find fault with people about things like changes in the way they described the color of “5″ when they were just learning how to describe colors of that sort.. That, to me, crosses an ethical line. All of us cross lines like that from time to time. It’s painfully (or perhaps, much more dangerous -- painlessly) easy to believe ill of someone you don’t like, and that bias can creep into your thoughts without even trying.
But IMO it’s everyone’s job to at least try and behave ethically in situations like these. Because the cost to your personal enemies may be higher than you intend it to be. And even if you did intend such harm... that’s a serious sign you need to change some things about how you deal with disliking people. Because this sort of thing can easily lead to obsession, stalking, bullying, and other negative behavior towards others. It’s the same reason most little kids have to be taught not to just haul off and smack someone they don’t like. What this person did was the verbal equivalent of whacking me upside the head because I was playing with hir favorite toy.
And -- from personal experience -- it’s very easy to convince yourself that you’re resisting such bias in your interactions with someone, much easier than it is to actually resist such bias. And here, in this whole section, I’m talking about just ordinary reasons people dislike each other, not that one person of the two is a really really horrible person or something. But it’s also easier to misperceive someone as horrible if you don’t like them. The conflict between me and this person was about personalities and ideologies and beliefs and political methods and things, not about one of us being a horrible person.
