About Tracy

I’m a sci-fi writer, graphic designer and urbanist in the Seattle suburbs. Reading and blogging are my favorite pasttimes and I’m an advocate of the indie web.

On this site, I track what I read and watch, write commentary on things that interest me, and collect reference information. I’m curious about everything from technology to history to ecology.

Lately I’m pondering these Big Questions. See what I’m doing and thinking about now.

If you’re looking for my sustainability or design services, please visit my consulting website.

My favorite things

I love native plants and spreadsheets more than is reasonable.

Find me around the web

Personal

Micro.blog — I post short life notes (lots of food) and occasionally share thoughts or links to posts on my other sites

Mastodon — I’m connected to the Fediverse through micro.blog — you can follow and reply to my notes at @tracy@notes.tracydurnell.com (sorry I realize this is confusing but I only want one account to look at 😉)

Last.fm — I scrobble my listens, mostly indie and electronic

Professional

Consulting — I provide sustainability outreach and planning to local governments, as well as interpretive sign design

LinkedIn — I work in sustainability using social marketing techniques — if we haven’t met, please include a brief note with requests to connect 😊 

My design portfolio on Behance

Contact me

Think we’d get along? I like meeting new people!

Email’s the best way to reach me, at tracy.durnell@gmail.com. (It should go without saying but no solicitations to sell me something please 😊)

Drop me a line about something I’ve written or read lately, share something you’re working on, ask me a question, chime in on something I’m thinking about lately, or whatever else you want to talk about 😊 I’d be delighted to proselytize the indie web to you if you are considering starting a website or blog, or discuss tracking reads online. I love going meta!

Hit me up if you’ll be near Microsoft main campus and want to grab an ice cream 🍨 (I don’t drink coffee 😉)

Personal projects

Sense Memory

golden-leaved larches at the bottom of a ravine in fall

Outdoor “sense memories” from adventures across the Pacific Northwest: three nature photos, a song, and a story. Check out the online magazine. (Completed in 2021.)

Texture packs of PNW nature

I love photographing natural textures. I’ve released many packs of texture photographs from Washington and Canada licensed under Creative Commons for designers and artists to use with attribution.

Craft Your Life Workbook

I designed the Craft Your Life Workbook to help creatives build habits and systems to achieve goals and craft a fulfilling, intentional life. (Completed in 2018.)

About this site

See all pages and a blog index.

I’ve delisted my website from Google (and blocked Bing and Apple) in protest of their AI practices, so the only way new folks find my site is through directories, small search engines, and other people. Thanks for linking!

Saved content

Along with blogging, posting reviews and logging reads, listens and watches, I use this site as a digital commonplace book for bookmarking (like a personal Pinterest).

I do my best to credit anyone whose writing or art I’ve saved, add commentary for fair use, and save a limited amount of information. But I’m human and sometimes I screw up. If I’ve posted something of yours that you’d like removed, email me at tracy.durnell@gmail.com and I’ll remove it ASAP.

My process

✍️ I shared my process for writing long blog posts and choosing between ideas to write about.

🔨 These are the tools and apps I use for life and work.

Comments

Comments are open but moderated for new posters, so might take a day or so to be approved and appear.

I also support webmentions so you can use your own website to reply to or mention my site. This site uses WordPress with the IndieWeb plugin to enable this functionality.

If you’d rather not leave a public comment, please do feel free to email me!

Colophon

The cover art on the homepage is a modified version of Martin Johnson Heade’s Hummingbird and Passionflowers from 1880ish. It’s purely ornamental, though I do have an ecology background!

See my privacy policy. Tl;dr I don’t track you.

Land acknowledgment

I live and work on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples, in particular the Duwamish and Stillaguamish Peoples. I honor the land itself by doing what I can to conserve and restore native ecosystems. I honor and thank First Nations people past, present, and future for their stewardship and environmental leadership. As a settler from another state, I express my gratitude for my adopted home. (Learn about land acknowledgment and the First Nations peoples who live in your area.)

I support the Duwamish Tribe’s application for federal recognition. I call on elected officials and government at all levels to honor treaty obligations. I call for the return of public land to tribal control or joint management wherever feasible. (Learn more about the Land Back movement.)

Like this website?

If you’d like to pay it forward, I encourage you to make a donation to your local public library 😊

(It’d also make my day if you send me a nice email 😉)

17 replies on “About Tracy”

I’m a book lover, sci-fi writer, and native plant nerd. Learn more about me, and see what I’m up to now. This is my personal site — you may be looking for my professional sustainability consulting services. Explore my site Join me in pondering my big questions (my approach to organizing my learning and thinking…

I’ve been going on a learning spree about digital gardening lately…

Not familiar with digital gardens? Pop over here and there for a few explainers along with functioning examples out in the wild.

Here’s my thought process as they pertain to my needs/desires (which can be completely different from yours so I encourage you to make your own conclusions).

The geek in me wants to have a digital garden with rows and rows of notes and ideas. Oh my!
It’s a human tendency to want to compartmentalize, to put things and words and thoughts and data into nice neat little boxes on shelves.
But can digital baggage become a psychic burden?
I keep coming back to old notes and finding them stale, no longer relevant.
So would I be accumulating words and data just for the “doing” of it?
When transitioning from house living to nomadic wandering, it meant shifting to an ultra-minimalist lifestyle because my tiny camper can only hold so many things. It forced me to get rid of everything and change the way I live.
Adapting to that life was surprisingly easily after a bit of time acclimating to it and I can’t imagine living beyond the means of my camper.
When staying in one place for unusually long periods of time (such as a couple years of recovery time from Lyme disease) I start to accumulate stuff again.
The difference this time around is awareness. I consciously feel the burden of these extra things and my constant instinct is to get rid of them as soon as I can. “Stay light!”
Being light of stuff brings lightness to spirit. It is freeing to be free of the burden of physical accumulations.
I’d imagine the same for data — it may not be physical but it can be an intangible/accumulative burden over time.
As much as I love the idea of having and tending to a digital garden, my wandering soul refuses it (and says my garden would wither!). It wants to be free in all ways, including data. Haw! Can’t explain it in any other way…
I have learned living the wandering life that change is constant — the environment and my “home” is always changing as well as my needs and wants depending on where I am.
Change also means maybe one day I’ll settle again into data accumulation for good cause?
While having a digital garden isn’t in the cards now for me, I enjoy browsing through others and see their value.
Thinking about growing a garden? Tips I’ve gleaned:

Bend the garden to you, not you to it. It exists to serve you.
Do it for you and not other people.
There’s no right or wrong way to garden — build or utilize what works best for you with the least amount of friction in cultivating it.
It can be a blog, a wiki, a card index, software or all of it. Whatever works for you.

Here’s a few favorites:

Tracy Durnell (engaging way of using WordPress as a garden!)
Winnie Lim (leverages WordPress and Pods creatively)
Maggie Appleton (beautifully illustrated)
Gwern Branwen (bewilderingly cool and complex)
Alexander Obenauer (check his lab notes)
fdisk.space (intuitive use of folders)
Gordon Branner (“Patterns” of thoughts)
Neil’s Digital Garden (very creative)

Have any thoughts or resources & cool gardens to share? Do chime in.

Ray

P.S. I do like the idea of saving individual memory snippets (as custom post types) and filing them as a living journal of sorts on my blog with bidirectional linking to relevant notes & photos. See here and scroll down a bit for an example. I suppose that could be a form of digital gardening-lite?

/* Memorable boxes */

.memorable{
width:60% !important;
*/ font-family:Inter var, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif; */
font-size: 14px; !important;
font-style: italic;
/* wrap long text and urls */
white-space: pre; /* CSS 2.0 */
white-space: pre-wrap; /* CSS 2.1 */
white-space: pre-line; /* CSS 3.0 */
white-space: -pre-wrap; /* Opera 4-6 */
white-space: -o-pre-wrap; /* Opera 7 */
white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; /* Mozilla */
word-wrap: break-word; /* IE 5+ */
padding-left:20px;
padding-right:20px;
padding-top:20px;
padding-bottom:10px;
margin-top:15px !important;
margin-bottom:15px !important;
background-color:#f5efe0;
border-radius: 255px 15px 225px 15px/15px 225px 15px 255px;
border:solid 1px;
box-shadow:0px 0px 22px -10px #000000;
border-style:dotted;

}
/* Paragraph */

.entry-content div p{
margin-bottom:0px;
}

.memorylink {
display:block;
font-size:14px;
font-style:italic;
text-align:right;
margin-top:-25px;
}

/* Image */
.memorable center img{
padding-top:10px;
padding-bottom:0px;
margin-top:-40px;

}

/* Hide response block */
#site-content .memorable .response{
display:none;
}

I have too many pages to fit in my nav! Here’s a sitemap of all the pages on this website. Blog Mind Garden Index Links to blog about Big Questions Big Questions Balanced Lifestyle Effective Creative Processes Writing Fiction Thinking Better Information Diet Future of the Internet Resisting Fascism Building Community Transforming Capitalism Collections Cool…