Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden
Tracy Durnell — Writer, designer, and sustainability consultant in Seattle
A writer and designer's mind garden, exploring big questions about taste, media diet, sustainable work, solidarity and indie web connection.
tracydurnell.comTracy Durnell's Mind Garden is what personal blogging looks like when someone takes it seriously as a thinking practice. She writes about culture, media criticism, creative process, and the indie web — weaving weeknotes, book reviews, music mixes, and long-form essays into an interconnected digital garden. It's thoughtful, opinionated, and genuinely personal in a way that most blogs aren't.
Written by Tracy Durnell.
Very Active
Publishes multiple times per week
2
Independent Blog
English
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Aura through the Cult of Media: synthetic becomes authentic
I introduce three “cults of digital aura” in Digital aura and the source of Truth — you can read this without having read it but it will give you more context. Tl;dr audiences judge the authenticity of digital art through distinct lenses of trust and uniqueness. In the Cult of Media, authorship is irrelevant to authenticity Digital works can be cloned indefinitely. By this affordance, digital media is meant to be replicated… and distributed. Online culture relies on repro...
Preventing bird window strikes
I have a couple window doors that reflect greenery, and we’ve had at least one bird strike (fortunately it recovered within an hour but we never want it to happen again 😢). Since then, we’ve kept the blinds down permanently, but that blocks our view, so I’m investigating other options. To prevent bird strikes, US Fish & Wildlife says (pdf): Vertical stripes or patterns (at least 1/4 inch-wide, maximum spacing of 4 inches), or horizontal stripes (at least 1/4 inch-wide, max...
Weeknotes: Feb. 14-20, 2026
Win of the week: did my taxes 🦾 Looking forward to: Homebrew Website Club Writing Edition, tomorrow the 21st! Stuff I did: took Monday off for President’s Day read through a revised version of the book 2 draft 2.5 hours writing — plugged existing scenes into a beat sheet, spreading them out to cover more of the character arc; did an inventory of actual written scenes and it’s fewer words than I thought (had a lot of prepwork that was getting counted) made my sister’s bi...
How I make a mix
I was putting together my sister’s birthday mix this week — the twentieth year in a row I’ve made one for her! 🙀 — and thought I’d write up my approach to mix-making in case it was interesting to anyone else. (Maybe this is how everyone makes mixes? You tell me!) I’ve been making mixes since about 1995, when my parents gave me a blank! tape! Our tape deck was connected to our CD player so I could make mixtapes from their CD collection… which meant they...
Weeknotes: Feb 7-13, 2026
Win of the week: finished my next digital aura blog post 🙌 Highlight of the week: got a really nice email about my post “Decoding failure” Looking forward to: bought tickets to a Banff Film Fest showing next month! This will be my first large indoor event since the pandemic started 😳 Stuff I did: 1 hour consulting — got an update but project still on hold 2.25 hours business development — updated language on my website and sent off updated proposal — they’r...
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