Sichang Island. Thailand

Exploring Sichang island in Thailand. As its name says, island is an isolated place and that’s great for creativity. Many artists chose islands for inspiration.

Being isolated reduces the chances of finding irritating people (or people in general). If one day an irritating organism appears in your way and makes you angry for whatever reason, that means your awareness level is poor. Even if you have to make effort to ignore it, that also demonstrates a not enough level of awareness. See that unbalanced organisms not as an enemies but as a trainers for your awareness. Once you are calm and better person the victory is instant and overwhelming. It will also confuses them sine they expected angry as an answer and it’s fun.

Anyway Thailand is not a place with those kind of people, just the opposite. Incredible good souls everywhere.

Btw, I love indigo color more and more everyday 🎈

The Nautilus Manuscript for sale

The goal of this notebook is to reproduce my journals in a way people from all the world can have them in their hands and feel the same touch, size, cover and paper than the originals.

Tittle: The Nautilus Manuscript / El manuscrito Nautilus
Size: 14 x 9 x 2,5 cm
Number of pages: 208
Paper: Vergè (laid) 100g/m2
Cover: Hard, black color and real leather
Bookbinding: Bound by hand

Produced in small batches. Check availability before placing an order.


Price: 325 EUR

AVAILABLE

Each copy is numbered and signed.

International certified shipping included.

IVA/VAT included in the price, when applied (inside European Union).
Shippings to worldwide.

How to order:

There are 3 ways:

1. Email me to naranjacorreo@gmail.com to place an order. Worldwide shipping from Spain.

2. 🇺🇸 USA customers can also buy directly here:

https://amarillostationery.com/collections/jose-naranja

Amarillo Stationery is an online shop based in USA. 

You can pay directly in USD. Domestic shipping from Chicago.

3. 🇯🇵 For Japan customers can also buy directly here:

https://wanderlustbytsl.com/collections/books

Wanderlust is an online shop based in Japan.

You can pay directly in JPY. Domestic shipping from Japan.

 

A few years after the release of The Orange Manuscript my second published notebook is now a reality.

A very personal project made with pleasure and full passion. Countless iterations to take care of every detail extended the process a lot of time. But it was worth, finally. 

When I was offered to publish it under a few of those "top publishing houses" I thought this would save me a lot of manufacturing work and headaches. However industrial process can't guarantee valuable details and accuracy. Mass production often kills the essence and that's exactly the key in this case.

Therefore I decided the production to remain full manual. This is time consuming and brings much higher costs and headaches but the result keeps the soul of my original notebooks. As I always say, making your own notebooks adds a unique and special feeling and link.

I found a small workshop with good professionals who take care of the bookbinding process, specially working with the laborious leather cover. Slow method but worth.

As for the printing I did numerous tests. I chose the best of the best and the print quality shocked me every time I see closely. Really magic! Thanks to the experimented good man from the printer who helped me a lot to manage some main guidelines in the beginning.

And the new baby is THICK.





The Nautilus Manuscript is facsimile, a replica which collects copies of my written pages from 2015 to 2019. Notes, ideas, memories, experiences and difficult to catalog stuff fill the pages. Many of these spreads can be seen in the draft or finished along my posts in Instagram. It's written mostly in Spanish and some pages in English. All full visual.

Here an overview of all the pages together and some samples:

 

 

 

I'm so happy to complete this personal project and now I can share it with the world.

Many thanks for reading.

Extra! @skybambi recorded this nice video flipping pages when she received her copy. 

You can watch it full here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CWyVTIUhu8M/

Or bellow in 5 parts:

Guided evolution drives to flight

How has nature found a way to flight? Many ideas around this question but somehow looks like there is a guided evolution in the process.

Changes in Bangkok style

I don't discover anything new when I say Bangkok has an unique aesthetic. Many details define that style and I will not enter in deep here. Maybe I will do in another post because it deserves it. 

Typography, use of reds, whites and dark blues together with tiny cubicles is signature of identity in bus stations. For me that's the feeling of starting a bus trip and happiness. And they expend real tickets! I mean, paper tickets with a few stamps on it.

Times change and now it's easy to see futuristic spaces everywhere. King Power desk in the airport is an example of spaceship design. Also uses reds, whites and blues but the result is cold. Only too clean workers and "office trained" people in the other side of the window. It doesn't provide me warm feeling or happiness at all. 

I guess they expand boring machine tickets, ATM style.

Baby Chicken CH11

In the year 2020 experiments with primares are forbidden. Scientist in this lab work with baby chickens trying to improve the brain activity using a software. Early days of Project BR+ (2022).

During a coffee break something happened: Specimen “Baby CH11” developed a further step in his intelligence. Not much, just up to human level, but enough to allow him scape from the box and walk around.

2 min later he managed to connect himself to a desktop computer due to the interface scientists set in his brain. It took him 5 min to understand the software, modify and apply it again in his brain. 2 cycles later Baby CH11 was smarter than any human ever. 1 min later he connected to Internet and got huge quantity of information and knowledge. He need just 3 min to hack a military super computer and used it as his brain. 20 seconds later he reconfigured the brain software again to reach super intelligence. 

Repeated this 100 cycles and his capacities grew exponentially.

AI had born in just 12 min. 

None was watching. Baby CH11 could be god now and submit humans to do whatever he wanted. But this AI has not moral. Actually he discarded that choice after 1 picosecond. What he needs now is a colossal supply of energy. Humans and the whole Earth are useless for him so he scape to the Sun. 

Nobody even noticed a chicken was missing.

This is the story about how AI was created by humans, left its biological nest and disappeared in the Cosmos. Did it happen also before? 

And... Will Baby CH11 come back to save his chicken friends?

Save the Mammoths

Designing a personal/business card during the last days was a never ending process.

More and more ideas came out, endless changes and however never happy since the result never shows the "personality & style". Suddenly I decided to have fun and avoid the pressure of doing something too deep and serious. I felt so good when freedom appeared and danced along the Photoshop screen. I think the guava juice I took triggered the decision and I'm so happy with it.

Thanks guava juice!

Now I rely on the texture and quality paper to do the rest of the job. I will show the final result soon.

Mandalay

I came back to Myanmar 10 years later. Photos above were taken in 2009.

In those days was mandatory to travel with a person assigned by the government plus the payment of 25 USD daily to that person. That man controlled everything, including the photos. My feeling then were its a nice but extremely underdeveloped country. No street lights at night. Now in 2019 I had the same feelings.

At least it's easier now, with no people from the government besides you all the time. However the weather these days was horrible. Unbearable heat.

I took some photos, this time with mobile. Here some of them:

Atmosphere in Mandalay is always warm.

Electricity cuts. About 20-30 times per day. Using Internet is scary movie.

Young pink monks spreading happiness.

More little pink monks.

Me. Banana hat stops the EXTREMELY high Sun waves.

For some reason there are this fuel stations style everywhere.

My wallet is too thin for the thick money.

Streets of Mandalay.

No explanation. I just like this photo.

The nature of spider's web

How does the spider learn to make its web? 

Is it just instinct? It looks like an artifact with not easy procedure to deploy at all. This tool definitely requires planificación and mind to visualice the result in advance, something not usual in animals. 

Does it learn from other spiders? I don’t think so because if we isolate a baby spider it could manage to make its web. 

Could we asume a certain level of intelligence in spiders? At lest a high level making web structures. For sure we don't know the hidden goals/plans of nature. And that's not very important. 

And finally the result is full of beauty. The beauty of nature. I'd wonder if other animals different than humans could appreciate it.

Brain connections. Inverted

Playing with Photoshop (one of the best toys ever) while I was designing new cards for my new deck I discovered the beauty of this spread inverted. Details mesmerize me and make me think "Did I draw it?"

A key idea in the evolution of our biological brain deserves much more attention.

Frame for Donau's Journey

 I didn't frame my own Donau's Journey copy until now!

Having this quite big size creation in my hands becomes a weird thing now. With the new frame it feels heavy, bulky and, more important, a finished work. Honestly there were many times when I thought this project could be just an idea (or a collection of many ideas) so complex than never would be a in a real paper.

I'm happy to see it on a wall. I chose a simple but strong and deep frame. It adds a perfect touch highlighting the artwork and at the same time doesn't take much attention.

I would be so glad if you send me a photo of you copy on a wall, please! The ones I've already seen were so great and.. in unexpected environments, oh yes.

You still can buy a copy here.

The Starmaker

Doctor D. Messking is a prestigious astronomer (he has an academic title and a prominent beard). But he is also a little dirty. During decades he worked cataloging stars methodically.

One day a SPECK OF DUST landed on the lens. 

His routine job didn’t help to spot the mistake. He included the new star in the catalogue. He shared his work with the scientist community. Then influential publishers distributed thousands of books. Those books were read by other scientists, teachers, etc. Soon students were obligated to learn the new star. Eventually these kids will procreate and will transfer this knowledge to their children. And so on.

This is an example of how humans perpetuate knowledge. They are specialist in sharing all kind of information, a top skill they can do better than any other animal. Sometimes not many are involved in the details of a discovery but they trust other people in a blind faith mode. That faith starts in the family, teachers and then continues in books, news and ends in the "specialists", the owners of the complex knowledge.

Same as in religions and other no-logic methods, science could also make the mistake of belief. Many scientists never participated in the experiments they believe. Most of the teachers even don’t know the source of information. The wheel continues by its own. 

Despite the development of basic logic, some people's brains use to be confused even in the clearest points. Maybe trust is a positive human trait, useful for evolution anyways. Or maybe it's all wrong and the rest of the species do it even worse than us.

The Orange Manuscript. New copies

A pile of fresh pages from the printer ready to be bound by hand. My robot assistant will be busy...

Still today seeing these pages al together fascinate me. The Orange Manuscript will be always my baby.

Orders can be made by email. Visit this post for more information.

Brain connections. Next levels

The next big step in mankind evolution (maybe the ultimate one) is the emergence of a Super Artificial Intelligence. Before that moment other events will happen. Humans have developed magical technology however there are not changes in our biological setup. Even for communicate each other we use EXTREMELY SLOW ways as talking, writing, etc. 

Connections brain-machine and brain-machine-brain will: 

1.) Boost the speed of information. 

2.) Open the door to another level of use of the brain: sharing feelings, instant knowledge or using other humans senses as they were yours. Even every discovery in this field is a huge thing by itself. Can you imagine coming alive again an old experience to your brain, let's say eating a lion, fighting with a cake (or the other way around better), wild sex adventure, etc., or even "import" those experiences from other people?

3.) As a future interface human-AI. I could imagine a scenario where eventually brains are connected each other and also connected to an AI. In this case brains are just like neurons in a new super brain. I guess that new entity will want to explore outside and establish connection with other intelligences. It looks like brain was designed to play with other brains.

Fascinating!