~dashus-navnul

I have never in my entire life wanted to be an artist.

I am a lot of things, but not that.

plate i

I suffer from chronic boredom and require increasingly interesting things to entertain me. From this condition, best described in Sarah Perry's "Grand Unified Theory on Nerdom", I became extremely adept at interfacing with the internet to find new and interesting information, so much so that I now do it professionally in my career as a political analyst. The way I justified this project to myself, the entirety of the time before I showed it to anyone was done under the assumption that no one would even care, was the idea that if I could solve Elden Ring's Final Secret in such a way that I could be credited with its discovery, I'd be able to use it as a credential for my career in lieu of the college education I don't have.

I stumbled into the art world about a year ago, when I brought this work to a literature event. I had worked on it for over three years at that point, and what started out by doing research for a short essay titled: Urbit and Dark Souls and The Fifth Wall had grown into an attempt to solve Elden Ring's final secret.

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On AI#

Yes, AI helped make this website; but no, AI did not help me make this discovery.

I began this project four years ago with a serious study of Elden Ring and the Dark Souls games. The discovery itself came almost two years ago—before the current generation of AI existed in any meaningful sense.

But even today, no AI could solve a problem like: "Find Elden Ring's final secret that Miyazaki hinted at. No errors. No hallucinations. 0 mistakes. Just find it."

Even if you told an AI the answer—that Elden Ring IS The Large Glass—and asked it to prove how, the details would be impossible. That the Great Runes are the Chocolate Grinder viewed from above. That Vyke on the cover is "the shot that got closest." That the Glass Shards scattered everywhere are literal fragments of The Large Glass. These connections require cross-domain intuition that current AI simply doesn't have.

Here's why:

Elden Ring and Marcel Duchamp's work are inherently pataphysical—operating according to Alfred Jarry's "science of imaginary solutions," the study of exceptions rather than laws. The secret I discovered exists at the pataphysical level. It's not a pattern to be matched. It's an exception. An imaginary solution that became real.

Current AI operates on statistical pattern matching. It finds laws—what usually happens, what's most likely, what the training data suggests. It cannot find exceptions. It cannot operate where contradictions are true. It cannot navigate the space where "there is no solution because there is no problem."

For AI to solve problems like these would require primitives that operate pataphysically. Semantic operators that find the swerve, not the average. A runtime where exceptions are first-class objects.