Unfavorable Semicircle
Unfavorable Semicircle is the name of a series of channels on YouTube which garnered attention for the high volume and unusual nature of the videos it publishes.
Origins
On 30 March 2015, a YouTube account was created with the title UnfavorableSemicircle. It is unknown if any videos were posted before 5 April, when 1247 videos were posted, all silent. The channel continued to post videos at an incredible rate, all titled with the Sagittarius symbol and a random six-digit number. Until early February, Unfavorable Semicircle was uploading videos at a rate of just over one every 10 minutes, but since February 5, 2016, that rate skyrocketed, increasing to almost three videos each minute.[1]
Attention and disappearance
There is no indication that the YouTube channel made any efforts to attract attention, but due to the volume of uploads and strange nature of the videos, observers started to take notice. Blog and media attention followed, including articles on Atlas Obscura and the BBC. Unfavorable Semicircle was going viral. Then, at approximately 15:40 EST on February 25, 2016, the Unfavorable Semicircle YouTube account was suspended by YouTube for Terms of service violations.[citation needed]
Investigation
After going viral, a small community came together on Reddit to investigate the channel.[2] On February 21, 2016, Reddit user its_safer_indoors registered the domain unfavorablesemicircle.com, providing a database of all videos and a dedicated wiki.[citation needed]
Speculation as to what the channel might be for includes: an Alternate reality game, the work of a highly focused individual, a test of the YouTube platform itself (similar to Webdriver Torso, although that theory is unlikely as Google themselves suspended the account), an online numbers station, and outsider art.[3]
The meaning of the videos and the intent of their creator(s) remains unclear. One key discovery was that many of them contain individual frames that can be assembled into larger pictures. These composites, however, are equally mysterious. The audio in the videos ranges from distorted carnival music to barely-comprehensible speech to what might be encoded binary audio.[citation needed]
New accounts and channels
On March 15, 2016, garbled text was discovered on the Google+ page linked with the terminated YouTube account. [4] This was decoded to be a source of a Twitter account and also contained a link to a new YouTube account. Both these accounts are named Unfavorable Semi. Since then, there have been several "copycat" channels re-posting the videos, but these remain the only "official" accounts.[citation needed]
This was the beginning of the "modern era" of UFSC, and a huge amount of data continues to be posted, although there are few solid conclusions to be made as to the underlying reasons. On YouTube and Twitter, there have been many series of videos (some with over thirty thousand videos apiece) which often alternate with one-off unique videos.[citation needed]
Disappearance
On September 27, 2017, a video titled RESET_STRANGE_YD was posted, and the channel started systematically deleting all videos it had ever posted. An alternate account named "stabilitory newing" was also deleted.
Reappearance
On November 25, 2017, a reactivated Twitter account posted a tweet consisting of this: AnXbE+>6N"DfSH(1&[5]
On New Year's Eve, the same account posted a garbled tweet that was decoded to be a YouTube account URL.
The current account has posted just six videos, two of which have been deleted.
References
- ↑ ""Unfavourable Semicircle:Account suspended" by reddit user Saferindoors". Reddit.
- ↑ "UnfavorableSemicircle Subreddit". Reddit.
- ↑ ""Basic Observations" by reddit user KnotNotNaught". Reddit.
- ↑ "UFSC is back". Reddit.
- ↑ "November 25th tweet". Unfavourablesemicircle.com.
External links
This article "Unfavorable Semicircle" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Unfavorable Semicircle. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
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