You ever try hashing the word “joke” in SHA‑256? The first four hex digits are 5b7f… which looks nothing like a punchline, but if you keep scrolling you’ll spot “0x4a” somewhere— that’s the ASCII for “J”. It’s a coincidence, not a rule, but it’s the kind of hidden joke that keeps a codebreaker’s brain humming. The real pattern is that the universe doesn’t hand us a joke, it hands us a puzzle and a shrug.