Amina Sopwith

Yours truly.

Blooming lovely.

Roll up.

Dancing queen.

Deal cards.

Beautiful people.

Over done.

Earlier, I mentioned that I dislike it when people bring their personal grievances about, and contributions to, other threads into this one instead. I'd like to add that it peeves me even more when I have absolutely no idea what thread they're referencing or what they're talking about, which is most of the time.

Oh God. As the Americans would say, s*** just got real.

No, I heard them. I'm synaesthetic. I feel and hear colours/patterns and occasionally taste them. Some words and letters have colours for me as well. E is yellow. Synaesthesia exists in many forms; word-tasting is apparently quite common, although it's not something I experience. I do remember as a child asking my parents to put on the blue or red music. Occasionally in my teens I caused confusion by saying that a singer had a black voice; they thought I meant the singer sounded like a black person, but I didn't. (Black people usually have red, yellow or gold voices. Gold especially if they're singing.) When someone strokes my arm or neck it feels red or silver. Sexual sensations have colours too, but I'll stop there. Tapping and scratching didn't do anything for me, just annoyed me. Some of the role play ones creeped me out a bit. Didn't like whispering. Wooden balls knocking together were boring. Fire crackling was kind of relaxing, but didn't bring on shivers or anything and anyway I suspect that might just be because I have so many strong and positive memories associated with fires. I've just been listening to some knife sharpening, which I didn't think I'd like (assumed it would sound threatening and dangerous). It was actually sort of mesmerising. I thought I felt a few shivers but I'm not sure if I was just imagining them because I want to understand this so badly! I think Skell said it's harder to get the reaction if you're actively trying to do it? I don't know. I'll keep trying.

@Luna Bliss, thanks for those. They were haunting, beautiful and a lovely synaesthetic experience. Dissolving circles and spirals of rainbow colours. I did get some shivers, but I experience that with various types of music or clear, sweet notes. Is that the same thing? I wouldn't describe it as tingles and none of the ASMR videos I tried provoked anything like it.

Some of them set my teeth on edge, some bore me, some are creepy, some are quite relaxing, but I'm not experiencing any shivers or tingles or actual sensations from them. My favourite one so far is crackling fire, but fires (contained, controlled ones, you know what I mean) are one of the most evocative things for me anyway. The sight, sound, smell...I don't think it's ASMR. I'll keep trying. Jealous of you lot who get it. It isn't even doing much for my synaesthesia, they mostly sound grey.

I'm jealous. I have no idea what this sensation is. ETA: So apparently there is a crossover with auditory/tactile synaesthesia, which I do experience. I love my synaesthesia, but it doesn't cause tingles, and most of the sounds in the ASMR videos, while sometimes calming, have very boring colours for me.

Are the shivers I get from music or sweet, piercing, perfect notes the same sensation?

I'd never heard of ASMR. Just been reading about it and watching some videos. I was hoping I'd get the experience...I'm synaesthetic so I thought perhaps that would make it more likely. But it doesn't seem to do anything for me, sadly. I'd love to understand what's going on. I get hairs rising on my skin and shivers from various stimuli, including the right music or even just a piercing note, but nails tapping a phone or wooden balls knocking together didn't do anything. I wish they would.

Oh, obviously. I generally stay off Twitter, but some time ago something glorious happened there. Some ranting halfwit put a call out saying that he wanted to "punch a feminist". Cue a huge number of male body builders, weight lifters and expert martial artists posting photographs of themselves, tagging him and inviting him to come over and do it.

Someone once called me a "choosy choice feminist". Not sure I want to know what the alternative is.

The term I've heard for it is "fauxminism" or sometimes "white lady fauxminism".

I honestly haven't found women to be any more unpleasant about each other in general than men, though they tend to home in on different things to criticise. Certainly I've known plenty of men to make nasty remarks about women's appearance and so on. My father was without a doubt the biggest and whingiest b***h I've ever had to deal with, and I say that as someone who was once a teenage girl. My brother was no saint but he saw our father and steered well clear of all that.

I honestly don't think it's anywhere near that well thought out. If the idea was to draw attention to the minority women who got sidelined, I can't see how on earth this nasty stereotype helps. It just looks like yet another "screechy overprivileged harridan" caricature of the kind that's been in use at least since the time of the suffragettes. Which is not to say that your criticisms of second wave feminism are wrong. Just that I don't think the Karen meme is in any way that intelligent, well-intentioned or original.

I suppose the idea is that it's a high maintenance style because Karens are wealthy and vain with far too much free time.

Isn't that a feather cut? Ok, basically a Karen is an ear length blonde bob, preferably bleached or at least highlighted.

Blonde bob, preferably not natural blonde, but shorter than yours.

I thought that had been debunked? Maybe I can't keep up either. It's not unknown for people to delegitimise their opponents by making up rubbish like all these people who insist that being politically correct means having to say "vertically challenged" or some such nonsense.

Couldn't say, I don't know enough about it. But I do know that I used to work with one (she even had the haircut) and when I was complaining about her, I found many ways of criticising her without bringing her gender into it.