TAKE MY ADVICE:

It's not like in the movies. You probably won't wake up thinking "Why am I in a room full of bloody corpses with a strange symbol tattooed on my palm?". No, it's the little pain-in-the-arse bits of missing information that make up the real mystery.

Amnesia sucks because you hear your friends joking about stuff that happened at a party, your party, and you feel as if you weren't even invited. It sucks because you remember watching scenes from the season finale of your favourite show but forget watching the eps leading up to it (which is basically the same as reading a spoiler). It sucks because your computer is full of files you created or downloaded that don't make any sense out of context.

I'll elaborate on that last point in a second, but let me start from the start.

A few months ago, I was visiting the Newcastle Ocean Baths with a group of friends. We made our way over to the Bogey Hole later in the afternoon. Apparently, I fell and banged my head on a rock here. I was only in a coma for three days, but when I woke, I'd forgotten the six week period leading up to the accident.

I remember bits and pieces of things that happened in this time - like short snippets of conversations, or brief parts of nights out - but I can't recall entire chains of events. My friends and family have been very supportive, and their eye-witness accounts (and the photos on my phone) have helped me fill in most of the blanks. From what I've discovered, those six weeks were a disappointingly boring period of my life; work, study, party, repeat, bang head on rock, forget.

Now and then, I'll come across a file hidden away on my hard drive that I seemingly created during this period of forgetfulness. For example, I'm always finding text files containing log-in information for websites I joined during those six weeks. And I've never heard of the band Abingdon Boys School, but according to my computer, I like them enough to download their entire discography. I've also found an image file named "Jointzilla" - a picture, likely done in Paint, of a large reefer chasing stick-figure people through a city. That sounds like the type of crude bullcrap one of my mates would send me, and I'm not puzzled to find it on my computer.

However, one file has left me more stumped than any other.

While searching through my folders not long ago, I came across a plain text file named "jokes". The first oddity, I noticed, was that the file was 3.24 MB. That's bigger than most images I have saved. I double-clicked the icon, expecting to discover about 1,000,000,000 lines beginning with "A guy walks into a bar" or "You know you're a redneck when". Understandably, Notepad had trouble loading the text, and when I clicked the window it gave me a "(not responding)" message. But after about ten seconds, I discovered this:

If these are jokes, they're in a language I don't speak. The only legible text is a date several years in the future. After that, it's all just a string of random ASCII text. I scrolled through the file, but at no point does the knee-slapping hilarity begin.

What does this file mean? Why would I download it? And from where?

I don't know why this "jokes" file has me more intrigued than, say, the login information I found for forums that no longer exist. Or that crude drawing on my desktop of a naked female body, with the breasts squinting like angry eyes and a speech-bubble coming from her privates saying "Not yours!". I'm probably attaching significance where there is none. Still, if anyone has any info on what this could mean, please drop me a line at [email address removed].

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

---------UPDATE 11/9/15

Hey, all.

No new info on the "jokes" file. Just writing to let everyone know that I'm alive and well, and that I haven't experienced any further brain damage (the other day, I pushed the same door marked "PULL" twice within ten minutes, but that was me before the accident). I'll keep linking this blog around and see if anyone can solve this mystery.

---------UPDATE 7/11/15

A friend tells me he's developing a program that works like a reverse-search engine, where you upload a file and it crawls the web to find where other versions of the same file are being hosted. Kinda like the "Search by image" feature on Google Image, but for sound files, videos, executables and the like. I figure this'll help me find the source of jokes.txt, since typing "jokes.txt" into a search engine gives me nothing (nor does typing any of the actual text within the file).

---------UPDATE 25/2/16

I'm removing my email address from this page. Since putting it up, I've received three times as much spam (no, I'm not interested in "increasing my size", thank you), but only recently have I received a flood of emails from strangers with comments like this:

"I've had a doctorate in neuroscience for over a decade now, and I estimate that the accident has damaged the language centre of your brain. Any healthy person could read the text in that screencap you posted just fine. The first line says "Two rabbis and a priest walk into 1€½0`Á80CÁ‡0Á0!€50­€K0-À". As a trained medical professional, I'd recommend taking 50 aspirin and calling this number: 1800zÚAŒ8ÜâÖ."

I'll admit, I had a chuckle at this message. But it was the first of about two-hundred.

It appears that someone posted a link to this page on /b/ or somewhere and told all their friends to have a good ol' screw with me. Some of the emails were funny. Most were poorly spelled. A lot were just plain cyber-bullying. So I've removed my email address from this page and will probably abandon that account altogether.

So basically, losing my email account has been the crux of these past seven-or-so months of keeping this blog. I've pretty much stopped posting links to this page around (not that I no longer care about figuring out my past, but I feel I've reached a dead end with this site, and my interest in the "jokes" file in general is waning). My friend's reverse-search program might still be useful, but I doubt he'll get that finished anytime before 2043, so I may as well just try moving on with my life.

---------UPDATE 8/10/16

Okay, so it's been a while since I last updated this page, but I've come across some HUGE developments. I've been sitting on these revelations for weeks, and I'm only just posting this now because it's taken me a while to wrap my head around what I've found. I thought I may as well post this on the (in)auspicious date of Oct 8, five years before the date that appears at the beginning of the "jokes" text file. It's a long update, so whoever's reading this (which is probably just the trolls that caused me to abandon my email account), bear with me:

My friend has finished the alpha version of that reverse-search program he's working on - much quicker than I was expecting, in fact. I used it to search for "jokes.txt" a few weeks ago and it yielded no results. The file apparently didn't exist anywhere on the net.

So, putting this search engine aside for the moment, I did some more sleuthing over the possible meaning of the jokes file. I found one solution on a tech forum; when you open an image file in Notepad, it displays as a string of random text resembling the picture as code. Someone must've created the jokes file as an image, then changed the file extension to ".txt" for some reason.

So naturally, I rushed to change the extension of the jokes file from ".txt" to ".jpg". And when I double-clicked the file...

Nothing. It told me the file was corrupted, which I took to mean the extension wasn't meant to be ".jpg". I changed it to ".png", ".tif" and a bunch of other image formats, but it still wouldn't open correctly.

Work became hectic at this point, so I put the whole mystery aside for another week. I then returned to my laptop and tried opening the jokes file with extensions for other file types, like video files and sound files (though for as much of a technodope as I am, even I know not to run mysterious files from unknown sources as executables). If this file was a video, it wasn't a ".avi" file. Finally, I tried changing it to "jokes.mp3".

That's where things got weird(er).

The preview told me that this sound file went for 2 minutes 8 seconds, meaning it actually was meant to be an Mp3. So I double-clicked it and listened with my best headphones, apprehensive about what I was about to hear.

It was a low-quality recording of someone playing the piano (a tune I don't recognise) while a man spoke over the top. His voice was muffled in a real "That's one small step for man" kind of way, so I couldn't make out many words, but my first thought was that whatever "jokes" he was telling had something to do with a twelve-inch pianist. There was also no laughing track, which I'm always thankful for.

Now I'm no maestro, but I know that whoever was playing the piano wasn't an expert. They had trouble keeping tempo, and at one point about 30 seconds in, they hit a sour note. The pianist then dicked around on the keys for a few seconds before beginning yet another melody that I'm not familiar with, but which reminded me of the X-Files theme.

All the while, the man continued to speak. At around the one-minute mark, the guy pauses briefly as if unsure of what he's saying. Not long after, there's a sound that I at first thought was a door creaking open, but quickly realised was a young girl's scream. The man pauses again in reaction, and I'm almost certain his next words are "What the...?"

He keeps talking, and after saying a word which sounds like "transformation", there's this glitchy dip in the audio and some child or animal starts whimpering. At about 1:30, the man groans loudly. This actually shocked me. He starts speaking more urgently as several high-pitched screams begin to overlap. I think some kid is even screaming "No!". Then, just as the recording reaches its climax, it goes silent. Well, almost silent. I wasn't willing to turn my speakers up any louder at this point. Before the playback bar had reached the end, the track stopped.

I was confused. I still am. What else is new?

I've listened to it a few more times, especially in the process of taking notes for this blog. When I listened to it on loop for an hour I started getting a headache. I still have no idea what it means. Maybe this was all some prank, but by who? What led me to download it? And why did someone change the file extension to a format that prevented it from playing?

And now for the really strange part.

So, returning to that reverse-search engine my friend made, I thought that maybe the reason it couldn't find "jokes.txt" anywhere on the net (besides maybe my pal being a lousy programmer) was because that file technically didn't exist, so I tried searching for "jokes.mp3" instead. Turns out I was right. The Mp3 is being hosted here: https://mega.nz/#!ANEFWDKL!j7t0KtSGjckk8Z125bPZIPq9sL1yA0RGXnuiw0qgDMY

From what I can tell, it's exactly the same as the file I found on my computer. So that solves at least one mystery, right? I might not know what the file means or why I downloaded it, but at least I know where from. There's only one problem. According to this hosting site, the Mp3 was last modified on April 19 last year.

The second day of my coma.

---------UPDATE 3/11/17

Been over a year since my last post, mainly because little has happened that warrants posting about. Still no answers regarding the “jokes” file. But over the last few months, there have been three small revelations I’ve had regarding my coma, so here they are combined into one extra-juicy super update:

One day this August, a chain of thoughts led to me suddenly remembering something from the six-week blackout period before I banged my head.

The thing I remembered is a conversation I was having with a few friends. We were on our way to a party out at a property, and we’d stopped at a servo to pick up some ice (no, no that kind of ice). For some reason, I brought up the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. Disclaimer: I’ve actually watched very little of that show, but come on, who hasn’t seen that first episode with the statues?

This led my mate to go into a tangent about Kirby games. Specifically, he told us about how most games in the series have King DeDeDe as a final boss, and his big evil plan was to steal all the food in the kingdom or something equally goofy. But then once you beat him, you unlock the REAL final boss, which is always some eldritch amalgamation of eyes, spikes and shadows that looks like it was born in the darkest reaches of Cthulhu’s rectum.

According to my mate, the final boss in one Kirby game was literally a weeping angel - one who wept blood. Not the kind of PG-13 thing you’d expect to see in that sort of game. I don’t know why I recently remembered this conversation. Probably just random. It's not much, but every recovered memory matters.

The second revelation is something I gradually realised over September. First, some backstory: there’s this musical instrument and equipment shop not far from where I live called Musos Corner. Back in 2005 when I was a wee lad, the place burned down, and they temporarily had to set up shop elsewhere. After the fire, there was this one creepy-arse ad I kept seeing on TV. It involved panning shots inside the burnt building, with close-ups of charred acoustic guitars and keyboards where the keys had melted. The store’s walls were dark as pitch, almost like the insides of a cave. There was a digital animation of a flame running along the bottom of the screen, and this one low, haunting note rumbling throughout the whole ad.

This ad freaked me the hell out back at that tender young age. I still have no idea why Musos strove to make the ad as chilling as possible. For a month, I couldn’t even face the TV during ad breaks. I haven’t seen the commercial since 2005... I think.

Now, the thing I slowly came to realise this September is that I have memories of the ad from my pre-coma period. Not distinct memories, as in remembering watching the ad then, but... It’s hard to explain. It’s like I’ve had a revelation that I was having a revelation about the ad during the memory-lapse period. I feel as if during that time, the ad became significant again after all those years.

That brings us to my third recent discovery.

I have a friend who’s an aspiring DJ; she’s really into sound design, and she has all the equipment, including turntables, mixers, speaker systems, the works. She also has a dog. He’s a little Shiba that she adopted back when doge memes were the order of the day, and he’s just the happiest doggo in the world. You could be carrying a set of neutering tools and he’d still look pleased to see you.

In October, I brought my friend the jokes.mp3 file to see if there was any way she could analyse it, being more versed in the science of sound than I am. She still hasn’t given me much of an answer, but that day, the first thing she did was play the Mp3 track through her god-tier speaker system.

Listening to the track through those speakers... I just felt it, the way I hadn’t felt it before. My heart was actually palpitating. The sound was rattling my bones as it never had before. The problem is, I wasn’t the only one. From the moment it started playing, her dog was paying attention, staring at the speakers. A short while in, he began to growl. By the end of the track, the happiest dog in the world was barking at the speakers as if jokes.mp3 were an intruder. We haven’t tried playing it through her sound system since.