Know Your Meme
The Curious Case of Smile.jpg I first met in person with Mary E. in the summer of 2007. I had arranged with her husband of fifteen but rather an amateur writer gathering information for a few early college assignments and, if all went when I was in Chicago on unrelated business, but at the last moment Mary changed her mind and locked herself in the couple's bedroom, refusing to meet with me. For half an hour I sat with fnntlessly to calm his wife The things Mary said made little sense but fit with the pattern l w expecting: though I could not see her, I could tell from her voice that she was crying. and more often than not her objections to speaking with me centered around an incoherent diatribe on her dreams --her nightmares. Terence apologized profusely when we ceased the exereise, and I did my best to take it in stride; recall that I wasn't a reporter in search of a story, but merely a curious young man in search of information. Besides, I thought at the time, I could perhaps find another, I put my mind and Bulletin Board System in 1992 when she first encountered smile jpg and her life changed forever. She and Terence had been married for only five months. Mary was one of an estimated 400 people who saw the image when it was posted as a hyperlink on the BBS, though she is the only one who ly about the experience In 2005, when I was only in tenth grade, smilejpg was first brought to my attention by my burgeoning interest in web-based phenomena; Mary was the most often cited victim of what is interest (other than the obvious macabre elements of the cyber-le gend and my proclivity toward such things) was the sheer lack of information, usually to the point that people don't believe it evern exists other than as a a picture file, that file is nowhere to be found on the internet certainly many photomanipulated simulacra litter the web, showing up with 4cha, particularly the /x-focused paranormal subboard It is suspected these are fakes beeause they do not have the effeet the true smile jpg is believed to have, namely sudden onset temporal lobe the most y on sites stuch as the ima This ipe's existence might be just as much out of fear as it to a is out of disbelief. Neither smile.jpg nor Smile.dog is mentioned anywhere on Wikipedia, though the website features articles on such other, perhaps more scandalous shocksites as goatse (hello.jpg) or 2girlslcup; any attempt to create a page pertaining to smile jpg is sunmarily deleted by any of the encyclopedia's many admins. Encounters with snile jpg are the stuff of internet legend. Mary E.'s story is not unique; there are unverified rumors of smile jpg showing up in the early days of Usenet and even one persistent tale that in 2002 a hacker flooded the forums of humor and satire website Something Awful with a dekuge of Smile.dog pictures, rendering almost half the forum's users at the time epileptic. It is also said that in the mid-to-late 90s that smile.jpg cireulated on usenet and as an attachment of a chain email with the subject line "SMILE!! GOD LOVES YOU Yet despite the huge exposure these stunts would generate, there are very few people who admit to having experienced any of them and no trace of the file or any link has ever been discovered. Those who claim to have seen smilejpg often weakly joke that they were far too busy to save a copy of the pictare to their hard drive. However, all alle ged victims offer the same deseription of the photo: creature (usually described a the flash of the camera, sits in a dim room, the only background detail that is visible being a human hand extending from the darkness near the left side of the frame. The hand is empty, but is usually vietims are more certain than others about what they claim to have seen). The muzzle of the beast is two rows of very white, very straight, very gteeth. This is, of course, not a picture, but rather a recollection of the victims, who claim to have seen the picture endlessly repeated in their mind's eye during the time they are, in reality, having epileptic fits. These fits are reported to continue indeterminably, often while the victims sleep, resulting in very vivid and in some cases it is more effective than others, Mary E., I assumed, was not on effective medication. That was why after my visit to her apartment in 2007 I sent out feelers to several folklore- and urban legend-oriented websites, and mailing lists, hoping to fi who I forgot completely about my pursuits. since I lad begun mⅣ freshman year of college and was quite busy. Mary ing about his For a time nothin From: marye* net I am incredibly sorry about my behavior last summer when you came to interview me. I hope you understand that it was no fault of yours, but rather my own problems that led me to act out as I did I realized that I could have handled the situation more decorouslyi however, I hope you will forgive me. At the time, i You see, for fifteen years I have been haunted by smile.ipg Smile.dog comes to me in my sleep every night. I know that sounds silly, but it is true. There is an ineffable quality about my dreams I have ever had. I do not move and do not speak. I simply look ahead, and the only thing ahead of me is the scene from that horrible It talks to me I thought for a long time about my options. I could show it to a stranger, a coworker I could even show it t Terence, as much as the idea disgusted me. And what would happen then? Well, if Smile.dog kept its word I could sleep. Yet if it lied, what would I do? And who was to say something worse would not come for me if So I did nothing for tifteen years, though I kept the diskette st has come to me in my sleep and demanded that I spread the word For fifteen years I have tood strong, though there have been hard times. Many of my tellow victims on the BBS board where I rirst encountered smile.ipg stopped posting: I heard some of them committed suicide. Others remained completely silent, simply disappearing off the face of the web. They are the ones I worry about the most. I sincerely hope you will forgive me, M. L but interview I was near the breaking point. I decided I was going to give you the floppy diskette. I did not care if Smile.dog was lying or not, I wanted it to end. You were a stranger, someone I had no connection with, and I thought I would not feel sorrow when you took the diskette as part of your research and sealed your fate. Before you arrived I realized what I was doing: was plotting to I could not stand the thought, and in tact I still cannot. I am a shamed, Mr. L., and I hope that this warning will dissuade you from further investigation of smile.jpg. You may in time en㏄unter someone who is, if not weaker than I, then wholly more depraved, someone who will not hesitate to follow Smi le.dog' s orders Stop while you are still whole Terence contacted me later that month with the news that his wife had killed herself. While cleaning up the various things she'd left behind, closing email accounts and the like, he happened upon the above message. He was a man in shambles; he wept as he told me to listen to his wife's advice. He'd found the diskette, he revealed, and burned it until it was nothing but a stinking pile of blackened plastic. The part that most dishurbed him, however, was how the diskette had hissed as it melted. Like sone sort of animal, he said. I will admit that I was a little uncertain about how to respond to this. At first I thought perhaps it was a joke, with the couple be latedly playing with the situation in order to get a rise out of me. A quick check of several Chicago newspapers' online suicide in the article. I deeided that, for a time at least, I would not further pursue the subject of smile jpg, especially since I had finals coming up at the end of May. But the world has odd ways of testing us. Almost a ful year after I'd returmed from my disastrous interview with Mary E., I com From: elzahir82.com found your e-mail adress thru a mailing list your profile said you are interested in smiledog. I have saw it it is not as the word The final line chilled me to the bone. According to my email client there was one file attachment called, naturally, smile jpe. I considered downloading it for some time. It was mostly likely a fake, I imagined, and even if it weren't I was never wholly convinced of smilejpg's peculiar powers. Mary E.'s account had shaken me, yes, but she was probably mentally unbalanced anyway After all, how could a simple image do what smile.jpg was said to accomplish? What sort of creature was it that could break one's mind with only the power of the And if such things were patently absurd then why did the legend exist at a at what would I do? Would I live my life as Mary had, fighting against the urge to eager to be And if I chose the latter route, how could If I went through with my earlier smile jpg, I decided, I could attach it as evidence. And anyone who read the article, anyone who took interest, would be affected. And aven assuming the smile-jpg attached to the emai was genume, would I be

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Know Your Meme

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