You may be pleased to note that this comment finally pushed me over toward finally trying Solarized in Emacs. I'm very used to high-contrast themes (blackboard for almost a year) so it's taking some getting used to. Especially in the emacs rcirc client where chat text is low contrast on the background.

edit: Lasted about a half hour for me; too low contrast and the cursor seems to be invisible, so impossible to tell where I'm about to type.