I have forty-four long-form posts since 2019 for your reading pleasure below, but perhaps you’d like to read a few words on how they came to be first?

I am happier writing for myself than I ever was writing for anyone else (although I will do that again, too, in case you have an interesting proposal). But even if I am thrilled with the WordPress layout I designed for varnelis.net, I realize that it isn’t ideal for reading a 6,000-word essay. But what website is? There is little question that PDFs are easier to read, whether on a tablet or in print. This, however, led me to a problem. Do I want to lay out every longer-form post since 2019 again? No.

There are, unfortunately, no PDF renderers for WordPress that satisfy me, and that makes sense. Exporting to a PDF is a complicated project, and when you are a modernist, your site has large graphics, and you write essays, not posts, you really need something custom, which, of course, was impossible until recently. But vibe coding has advanced significantly since I wrote about it in December’s “What Did Vibe Coding Just Do to the Commons?”

Some encounters put me in a foul mood yesterday morning, so as sometimes happens, I became extra productive and I set out to build a small piece of bespoke software for this site: a local Mac app that fetches my published WordPress posts, gathers the images and captions, lays everything out in a restrained publication format, and then lets me review the result before uploading it back to the site automatically.

If you still, somehow, think that AI is not useful for anything, please check out the PDFs below and tell me how long it would have taken you to write a comparable application to translate them from HTML? Things have changed a great deal since 2023. I used ChatGPT’s Codex to write this code, and, unlike my experience in December, I was a distracted supervisor all day, cleaning up, working on the draft of the introduction to my next book, the Generative Unconscious (this will be the subject of an e-mail later this week, likely tomorrow). There was no endless babysitting; Codex just built the application, at one point going off to code for over 90 minutes.

There is something important here to me, which is the return of computing to something more personal, something I own because I made. I am not planning to distribute this, since it is too idiosyncratic a project; this is bespoke software, and, if the code was written by an AI, nobody else would have come up with the same result. It reminds me very much of the early days of personal computing, when users (like me) routinely wrote small programs for their own needs: a database for a player-piano sheet-music collection, an extension to BASIC to enable better graphics, a tool for managing all the shareware I had downloaded. Software often did not come in a shrink-wrapped package, obtained by online subscription, or downloaded from a carefully gated store. Software was closer to a workshop practice. You made tools when the available ones did not quite fit the work, or you remade them, often again and again.

My PDF renderer is in that spirit. It is software made for one site, one archive, one way of writing and publishing. That specificity is the point. As AI makes it possible to roll one’s own programs again, we will see more of this: not just apps built for markets, but tools built for particular lives, practices, archives, gardens, and bodies of work. Sometimes living in interesting times isn’t all bad.

Content by Date

2026
May 3 · The Generative Unconscious (Introduction) [HTML]
April 24 · Ecological Balance and the Sacred Landscape of Senjōgahara [HTML]
April 10 · The Zakkyo Biru of Ginza [HTML]
March 31 · Zen, Time, and Three Gardens in Kyoto [HTML]
February 22 · The Salon and the Olympics [HTML]

2025
December 31 · East Coast West Coast (After Bob and Nancy) [HTML]
December 15 · What Did Vibe Coding Just Do to the Commons? [HTML]
November 23 · The Lost Canals of Vilnius [HTML]
November 6 · Stochastic Histories [HTML]
July 25 · Humanity and Its Double: The Uncanny in Art and Artificial Intelligence [HTML]
June 15 · The Rise and Fall of the Author [HTML]
May 19 · On Russel Wright’s Manitoga and the Mid-Century American Landscape [HTML]
May 6 · The First Flowers of Spring: Hepatica, Rue Anemone, and Cultural Ecology [HTML]
May 1 · On the Golden Age of Blogging [HTML]
April 21 · The Phantasmagoria of the Landscape: Japanese Gardens in America [HTML]
April 11 · The Generative Turn: On AIs as Stochastic Parrots and Art [HTML]
April 5 · After the Infrastructural City: On Abundance [HTML]
March 31 · The New Surrealism? On AI and Hallucinations [HTML]
March 21 · National Populism as a Transitional Mode of Regulation [HTML]
March 16 · Skunk Cabbage and the Entropic Landscape [HTML]
January 27 · Oversaturation: On Tourism and the Image [HTML]

2024
December 23 · 7 Fables of Accelerationism [HTML]
December 22 · Speculative Architectures: The Radical Legacy and Fables of Accelerationism [HTML]
October 30 · The Witching Cats of New Jersey [HTML]
September 30 · We Went for a Walk on Turkey Mountain [HTML]
August 9 · A Trip to Lithuania and the Baltics [HTML]
April 2 · Keeping a Phenological Diary [HTML]
March 8 · On the Pictures Generation and AI Art [HTML]
March 3 · Vernal Pools at the Great Swamp [HTML]
February 25 · California Forever, or the Aesthetics of AI Images [HTML]
January 14 · Walls in the Landscape [HTML]

2023
December 19 · Curb Your Enthusiasm [HTML]
October 12 · On the Florilegium [HTML]
August 7 · Preliminary Findings Toward an Architectural History of the Network [HTML]
June 13 · On Art and the Universal, II [HTML]
April 29 · On the Matrix (Native Plants, That Is) [HTML]
January 29 · Wastelands: An Analysis of the Early Anthropocene Swamps of Glacial Lake Passaic [HTML]

2022
December 11 · 20 Subroutines for Humans Made by a Computer [HTML]
July 20 · On Art and the Universal, I [HTML]
April 27 · The Native Plant Garden at Highland House, Montclair, New Jersey [HTML]

2021
May 5 · A Spring Tour of Our Forest Garden [HTML]

2020
May 15 · Native Plant Podcasts [HTML]
May 14 · Art and Gardening in the Time of Crisis [HTML]

2019
July 11 · On Gardening [HTML]