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Activism Political Commentary

Letter to my state reps re: Washington State budget

I know the legislature has a tough task ahead balancing this year’s state budget. I saw that Governor Ferguson has proposed using funds from the Climate Commitment Act to fill the gap (which is technically allowed).

Given the horrific flooding our state just endured, and the increasing wildfires every summer, I believe that diverting climate money to any other use besides resilience and adaptation, active transportation, and clean energy is shortsighted.

While I understand that the budget must pencil out and it will be challenging politically, I strongly urge you to support new sources of revenue, including a 2029 income tax but also options that can provide immediate relief. Please use climate money to pay for climate, not filling the budget gap. This sets a bad precedent, so every time there’s a budget gap in the future the legislature may find it easiest to simply borrow against our futures, when it is urgent that we act on climate NOW considering the built-in lag of warming even after emissions decline.

Climate change is an existential issue that needs our full backing. Please support new sources of revenue and preserve climate funding for climate action.

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Culture The Internet

Embracing influence

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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A case for tolerating the uninteresting by Venkatram Harish Belvadi

“There is, hidden in plain sight, a vicious circle that stands to subsist unless we consciously broaden our horizons and sample content we thought we were not interested in at first. The troubling question that follows, for me, is where we draw the lines between novelty, familiarity and interest, particularly when one of our stated goals is to engage with and broaden a certain community, welcoming new people into the fold.”

Venkatram writes here about attention as social construct in a way that meshes with how I’ve been thinking about taste and preference lately — that in our culture’s valorized conception of the individual, we would like to imagine our taste is wholly our own and our preferences reflect something innate about us, when culture can only have meaning when shared and our taste is influenced by those we admire and feel kinship with. Michel Faber’s Listen likewise proposes our musical taste is socially derived and that there is no “quintessential form” of music, regardless of how much high culture canonizes Western classical music as the epitome of the medium.

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Culture The Internet

The world in the computer

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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3 thoughts while pushing a wheelbarrow by Austin Kleon

“The computer used to mean the world to me. The computer was a portal to the world I wished to be in. Times change, and I no longer wish to be in contact with much of the world that’s in my computer.“

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The rise of the troll state by Ryan Broderick

“Politics — and political violence — is now something performed, first and foremost, for an online audience. It almost doesn’t matter what happens irl if it makes noise online.”

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Weeknotes

Weeknotes: Jan 3-9, 2026

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Rough week. I feel vast sorrow that so many Americans want an America where the government may, with impunity, openly murder anyone who disagrees with their ideology. Abolish ICE, defund the police, and impeach the illegitimate insurrectionist* before he illegally invades another country 🙃

Win of the week: published the next piece in my digital aura series!

Looking forward to: going to walk with my friend for the first time in a month — I’ve been giving my testy hamstring a break

Stuff I did:

  • 0.5 hours consulting
  • 3.25 hours business development — had a call with a prospect, hopefully will be invited to bid
  • left a voicemail for my Congressional Representative over the weekend asking her to vote in favor of impeachment of the President for kidnapping the leader of a sovereign nation and announcing that “we’re running” Venezuela so we can steal their oil (she voted to table impeachment after the Iran attack last summer)
  • researched HSA rollovers and decided against combining an old account because the customer service was so bad at the new account 😒
  • sold off the rest of the green energy mutual fund I had
  • cleaned up my Goodreads shelves — I had a bunch I made when I joined the site in like 2012 in hopes of better recommendations, and they’ve been cluttering up my lists ever since! I’ve also had interests change so dumped some less relevant shelves and added a couple new ones that are more pertinent
  • it was so nice today I went out and pruned for an hour ✂️ my favorite kind of gardening, satisfying and visually impactful — cleared around some witch hazels that are getting decent sized to give them more room and cleaned up the border with my neighbor, who unfortunately for him likes his yard immaculate and I basically have a hedgerow because I’d rather have (humming)birds
  • attic inspection — no mice or mold!
  • living room shuffle
  • hung out online with my friend after taking a couple weeks off from our usual hang for the holidays
  • baked coffee cake after waking up early unintentionally on the weekend — my husband kindly waited to tell me about Maduro until after we finished brunch so I could enjoy it
  • attempted to make soft-boiled eggs for a second time, and failed again — gotta try a different technique (I tried Kenji López-Alt’s method from The Food Lab)
  • watched The Founder — I’ve been boycotting McDonald’s since circa 1999 and I will continue to do so
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Art and Design Featured Technology

Digital aura and the source of Truth

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ethereal, indistinct painting of a steam engine approaching atop a bridge in a murky world of yellows, grays and blues
Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway by Joseph Mallord William Turner, from The National Gallery.
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Aura derives from a source of Truth

Aura as expression of sublime

Nikhil describes the impact they felt upon seeing JMW Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed (1844) in person for the first time:

“At once, I could see the figures but also feel how Turner experienced the world in that moment: both amazed by the shifting nature of the sea and the atmosphere and cautiously interested in how the technological advancements in bridge-building and railroads seemed to fit into it. This is the beautiful, awestriking world, the pigment seemed to whisper, as much as I can understand it.”

In a sense, Nikhil is describing Truth channeled through the artist. The art object electrified a connection between artist and viewer, transmitting the artist’s experience of truth across time. To express aura, art must be authentic to its sublime, whatever that might be.

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Featured Reflection

2025 in Review

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Tracy in front of fancy garden and house with big yellow and red flower brooch
on a local garden tour over the summer

What I worked on

  • consulting: supported outreach for a construction and demolition waste policy through June, then they referred me to their colleague to develop outreach materials for their green building program
  • business development: I bid on an RFP in the spring and got an interview, but wasn’t selected; met with a potential client at City of Seattle in the fall but am still waiting to be added to their roster before I’m allowed to do work there
  • fiction writing: continued to revise the same draft I’ve been working on for-ev-er — logged 180+ hours (~3.5 hours / week)
  • blogging: I published 283 public posts overall
  • gardening: pruning my two niwaki project trees… got a taller ladder so I can get at the top of the pine
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Featured Music

2025 in Music

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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5x5 grid of top played albums in 2025 - list in caption
Top albums of 2025 (links to Bandcamp) — Top row: DEMONS & NIGHTCORE by ALEX & TOKYO ROSE, Let’s! by Mecha Maiko (lol I was #1 album listener on last.fm), Deadbeat by Tame Impala, acts of rebellion by Ela Minus, Red Moon by Jessy Mach; Second Row: What Occurs by Islands, The Slow Rush by Tame Impala, Secondhand Rapture by MS MR, Polygon by Battle Tapes, Nadir by Sababa 5; Third Row: Valebol by Valebol (I’m surprised, didn’t feel like I listened to this much), Crisis by Dawnrazer, Hardware by Street Cleaner (a recurring favorite), Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy by Mindless Self Indulgence (sorry husband), Light & Magic by Ladytron; Fourth Row: Shooting Star by LukHash (cheating because only one song), Out of Love by Mister Heavenly, Django Django by Django Django, Thirst by SebastiAn, Gumshoe by Samantha Crain (also cheating because I only bought two songs but listened to them a TON); Bottom Row: Trilogy by Carpenter Brut (really?), The Moon & Antarctica by Modest Mouse, Pony by Orville Peck, White Bat IV by Karl Casey, Girl with No Face by Allie X (also only bought one track)

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What I listened to in 2025

I listened to about 16,863 songs — on average, 46 songs a day. Last.fm says this is 46 days of listening 👀

  • 2,665 unique tracks (down 7% from 2024)
  • 762 artists (up 10% from 2024)
  • 1,063 albums (up 12% from 2024)

Monthly listening roundups

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Weeknotes

Weeknotes: Dec 27, 2025 – Jan 2, 2026

trees looming in the fog
a foggy last morning of the year

Win of the week: I pre-prepped veggies the night before for a big New Year’s Day breakfast

Looking forward to: continuing vacation mindset for two more days

Stuff I did:

  • online window shopping
  • catch-up chores
  • finished my year-end reading review and 20 favorite books list
  • worked on other blog posts but they’re not done yet
  • looked into options for getting my mini PC off the ground and discovered that my monitor has a VESA mount slot so I may mount it back there… I’ve had it on the ground instead of the desk because the sound annoys me (did not consider the sound when I impulsively decided to get one) but crawling under my desk to wake it up every day is annoying… I’m wondering if having it behind the monitor might block some of the noise when the second fan turns on
Excel bar chart showing three years of electricity usage by month compared with average temperature
updated my home energy use analysis… too early to say whether the new attic insulation has made a difference since December’s bill only reflects three weeks  of usage 😉 didn’t know how to properly show two datasets in one graph so I just made two and put the temperature one on top 🤷‍♀️
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Featured Meta Reflection

2025 Year-End Reading Review

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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What I Read in 2025

Wooing the Witch Queen by Stephanie Burgis
I read this book 3 times this year ❤️

I finished reading 169* books in 2025, just around what I read in 2024.

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Music

Listened to The Crane Wife by The Decemberists

Listened to The Crane Wife by The Decemberists from en.wikipedia.org

2006 studio album by The Decemberists

I was SO into The Decemberists in college. This album survived The Now-Regretted 2010s CD Purge even though I wasn’t super into them at that point — had the sense I just needed a break and this one would come back.

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