If you live on the famed Left Coast, hope you can make one of the meetups we have in the next week. Readers have very much enjoyed getting to know like minded people.
All meetups are 5:00 to 8:00 PM. We’ll provide maps for Portland and Seattle closer to their dates.
San Francisco Saturday July 14
Press Club
20 Yerba Buena Lane
San Francisco, CA 94103
415 744-5000
Portland Wednesday July 18
Kell’s Irish Restaurant and Pub
112 SW 2nd Ave
Portland, OR 97204
503 227-4057
The people at Kells have been super helpful but they’d like a headcount update. I told them 35 to 50 but think 35 to 40 might be a better guess. If readers can pipe up in comments to let me know if they are coming and whether they are brining significant others and/or friends, that would help.
Seattle Thursday July 19
Barça
1510 11th Ave
Seattle, WA 98122
206 325-8263
See you soon!
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I will be at the Portland meet up, possibly with one friend.
I will be at the Portland meetup.
For those unfamiliar with downtown Portland: Note that the MAX line runs on SW 1st Ave near Kells, with a stop at Oak St. The Skidmore Fountain stop under Burnside is less desirable.
I’ll be there, probably alone. Let you know if my grandson can make it.
I will be at the Portland meet up.
I will be @ PDX
Two of us will be in Portland.
I am no longer in Seattle! Enjoy the exchange. Sadly, I am now too far away to travel to this meetup.
I wish I had known about the SF meetup earlier! I’m seeing the African American Shakespeare Company’s Richard III this evening (yes, that is a shameless plug for a great theater company in town…plus a play about power grabbing!) and while it is not until 8, I may not make it over to the Press Club before 5. It’a a low-probability but hopeful maybe.
Aiee, the Press Club OPENS at 5:00 PM, so if you get there early, you will need to wait. But I hope you can swing by!
Sorry not to have made it. Next time, I hope!
M.
I somehow missed seeing post about SF meetup until late yesterday. Regrets. Can’t make it. 5 hour round trip from here but worth it…
I expect to be at the Portland event.
See you in Seattle!
I’ll be at the Portland meetup with a plus one.
I’m trying to arrange things so I can make the Portland meetup, but my wife is working then and the kids are still a bit too young to drink Guiness.
I plan to be at the Portland meetup solo, work permitting.
Excited that a NC meetup is here in Portland. I will be there, barring any unforeseen difficulties.
I’ll be at Portland.
Cannot attend the Seattle event.
Medical problems.
I’ll be at the Portland meeting for sure. Hope to bring two friends.
Seattle taxi offer still stands – contact me at my email
(I suppose it shows to you admin peeps? )
One more for the Portland meetup at Kells on Wednesday. Will there be a sign? Secret handshake?
Let me make a few observations about the San Francisco event. I was the fit guy, who is (unfortunately) antagonistic at times but certainly not towards Yves or any of the attendees. I undoubtedly spoke with the other attendees about health, exercise, and cooking. Did anybody else notice the famous Japanese noodle restaurant Ippudo next to Press Club? I was tempted to dine there and compare their noodles to my own mean bowl of ramen. I am recycling some of what I said to the other attendees.
I never knew “Yves” was pronounced like the beginning of the word “eavesdrop”. I always thought the “s” was silent as in the brand name Yves Saint Laurent. Yves, what is the correction pronunciation?
Thanks to Yves for coming out a meeting us. Numerous authors and thinkers on my bookshelf have greatly influenced me, and none of them have the graciousness of Yves to meet her comrades (or disciples). And if they do, I still never get the opportunity to have a conversation with them.
Speaking of conversation, Yves speaks (and presumably thinks) rapidly – so rapidly that when I was halfway through articulating my thought she was already on the next insight. She mentioned her slow typing in a previous post. Don’t the slow fingers contradict the fast moving gears in her head?
Yves spoke about the numerous browser windows and tabs she has open when she is writing, and this is one reason for her aversion to smartphones. “I have enough information to sort through. I’m not about to answer to a text message because somebody else expects immediate attention.” Ok, she wisely rejected the information on a phone as too attention demanding and trivial, but how does she hoover up all the other information and then somehow see clearly? In my mind, Yves and Lambert are looking at green Matrix like screens and inexplicably finding the valuable stuff. And let’s not get started on Michael Hudson’s transcendent clairvoyance.
I am a long time lurker here. In the past, I never commented because I felt everybody else was smarter than me. In the present and future, I likely won’t comment much because I have severe light sensitivity, and that precludes any sort of lengthy time looking at screens. Nevertheless, NC is so important I tend to copy and paste the posts into a word processor and then read it on paper. I too am smartphone averse and prefer text on dead trees. I stand here silently observing this community, and hoping the contributors and commenters succeed – especially in terms of achieving justice.
Thanks so much for coming to the event and giving your impressions. Lambert and I learn so muc from readers both in person and in comments. And yes, Yves is pronounced like “Eve”. The “s” is silent. And thanks in particular for your support of our efforts.
> , I likely won’t comment much because I have severe light sensitivity, and that precludes any sort of lengthy time looking at screens.
Just for due diligence, readers, do any of you have a similar problem and have you solved it?
Several. If this person is a heavy mobile user (the post is somewhat ambiguous) I would recommend buying a nice pair of headphones (there are some very comfortable bluetooth ones) and downloading this app that does an exlent job with Text to Speech. When it comes to reading text I am HORRIBLY slow; my ADD has my eyes going line by line and by the end of the first paragraph my brain has moved on to what I need to do that evening, or an interesting but irrelevant tangent. With TTS I can be sure the voice is reading at a speed I can comprehend and still be doing any of a million mindless tasks that require sight. With the advance of TTS I have completely removed all shitty cable news and cut back on podcasts and substituted in NC instead. I use this app (Text-to-Speech Reader free) for non-mobile. The mobile App is remarkably good at sorting through all the extra crud on websites and only reading the article you ‘shared’ to it from your browser and adding them to a play list. With blogs like this, however, it does keep everything. Which is good because the comments come up, but you might have to listen to redundant, or manually skip over the article headers to get to them and will have to manually skip to the next article upon completion or suffer through hearing the topics and blogroll lists for the umpteenth time.
If that isn’t your thing and you just want text easy on the eye’s, every operating system has a ‘high contrast mode.’ Here is how to turn that on in Windows. However, as I just learned that doesn’t do anything to web browsers. So you can google your favorite browser and ‘High Contrast’ for a link to an addon for the browser. Here is one for Chrome. They will all come with a set of ‘hot keys,’ which, when all hit at the same time toggle the contrast mode on/off; in windows it’s left-alt + left-shift + print screen.
Additionally I would Highly recommend TTS for anyone that has to edit text. Something else I am god awful at, but can do reasonably well now**. I will note that there are the occasional and amusing TTS error that pop up. For instance, it took me a few times of it happening to figure out what on earth 21 Colombian Pesos ( aka COP) had to do with climate change. Of course, had I not been multitasking already the first few times it happened I probably would have been able to figure that out by the time the article ended.
**there is only so much effort I’m willing to put towards fixing run ons or reworking my overzealous commas in a comment rather than something more important , as opposed to just not noticing.
My unique medical problems (blessings, depending on how you look at it) are quite a bit different than Userfriendly’s. I may have sensory processing sensitivity, which means the acuity of all five of my traditional senses – especially vision – are extraordinarily sharp. The advantage of this means I can see 20/15 with seemingly amazing ability to see in low light conditions. The disadvantage of this means I have to wear sunglasses everywhere, indoors and outdoors, and even at night. Oh and it gets much worse. Working in any office environment, particularly with fluorescent lights and monitors, is impossible because that means I experience insomnia and extreme eye pain. I’m also perpetually intimidating people with dark sunglasses and scowls (and they probably discriminate against me too.) Fortunately, my eyes don’t have any problem with sunlight.
As for “solving” this problem, my obsession has led me to find a more comprehensive solution than any doctor has offered. Here is just a sampling of ideas.
In the evening, dim the interior lights and lower the brightness of your monitor or phone to the lowest possible setting that still allows you to comfortable read the text. Try also to avoid images and videos. Or better yet, just abstain from using computers for long periods of time, especially at night.
Computers are unfortunately unavoidable, though smartphones are not – as Yves and I demonstrate with our distaste for them. I use the Firefox add-on “Invert Colors” and “PAW Invert” to force white text on a dark background. I also use a dark color theme for my desktop to make menus and everything else comfortably dark. Software developers who blind me by overriding my dark proclivity with black text and bright white background deserve a special place in hell. And “friends” who shove a blinding bright smartphone in my un-sunglassed face too.
Make sure to exercise. Exercise fixes everything. If my eyes are hurting or I am suffering the aforementioned insomnia, exercise will certainly alleviate that.
i plan on attending the portland event
I’ll see you in Seattle!
Wow, there’s like a million portlands, and just a few seattles. Come on seattle!
And now, after my exhortation, I won’t make it tonight. Sorry for the bail, and I’ll be interested to hear about it!
I’ll be in Seattle. It’s possible I’ll be at Portland. Thank you for meetups.
Great! I plan on attending in Portland Wednesday.