“Unfavorable Semicircle” was originally the name of a Youtube channel posting strange videos. This community is dedicated to finding out what they mean.
While UFSC remains “unsolved” as to its origins and purposes, it has created a community devoted to exploring it, as well as serving as artistic inspiration.
On April 5, 2015 a YouTube channel named Unfavorable Semicircle started uploading strange videos. Generally these videos:
With a few exceptions, the names of the videos start with ♐, the astrological symbol for Sagittarius.
The initial videos from were titled with strings of digits. Around February 14, 2016 videos titled “♐BRILL” followed by a number counting up were posted. (The earliest analysis broke these original videos into a number of “seasons”.)
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. Reddit threads on r/UnexplainedPhotos/ and r/DeepIntoYouTube/ brought attention to the phenomenon, which lead to the formation of /r/UnfavorableSemicircle/ to centralize investigations.
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 for TOS violations - most likely from uploading too many videos too fast.
The suspension of the original youtube channel only increased the interest in the phenomenon, and theories and ideas blossomed on the reddit.
On March 15, 2016 garbled text was discovered on the Google+ page linked with the terminated YouTube account. This was decoded to be source of a Twitter and also contained a link to a second YouTube account. Both these accounts were named Unfavorable Semi. (Since then, there have been several “copycat” channels re-posting the videos but this was the only “official” youtube account.)
This was the beginning of the “modern era” of UFSC, and a huge amount of data continued 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.
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 these videos ranges from distorted music to barely-comprehensible speech to what might be encoded binary audio.
After a pause of several weeks, on September 16th 2016, Unfavorable Semicircle became active again. During this downtime, a second youtube channel named Stabilitory newing was launched. A post on the main channel’s Google+ page would later suggest a link to Stabilitory newing, which would start posting videos in its own variation on the UFSC “style”.
Discoveries over the next year would include:
On September 15, 2017, after more than two months of silence, a new video named ♐RESET STRANGE YD was posted. Shortly after that, videos were being manually deleted from the youtube account before the account was manually terminated. Around the same time, the stabilitory newing youtube account and twitter account were also deleted by their users.
After the “reset” the only known account connected to UFSC was the G+ page.
Some time in November 2017, the @unfavorablesemi twitter account was either reactivated by the creator(s) of UFSC or claimed by another user. On November 25th it tweeted a cryptic text string, and then a short series) followed by a standalone video). Since the Twitter account had been deleted and then reactivated, suspicion arose that it might not be controlled by the original author(s). The quality of the work and consistency with past material has, however, deemed it as worthy of further investigation from the community.
On New Year’s Eve, another cryptic tweet was posted, and when the text was decoded the next day, it lead to the discovery of a new youtube channel.
Shortly before the announced ending of the Google+ service, it was observed that the third G+ post was removed; shortly after that, a new post appeared. Headed “♐REAL”, it contained a list of various accounts, giving the implication that these alone were the products of UFSC’s creator(s). The absence of the third youtube channel (as well as the caveat that the original Twitter account was real up to the date of the Reset) casts doubt on the provenance of all the post-reset videos.
One December 31, 2019, the third/”un-REAL” channel came to life after a year of dormancy, posting the first of three videos in the ♐FORM series. This was the first posting since the final Google+ post.
In the absence of new dispatches from UFSC, the community investigating it continues to congregate at the Discord server, even if things are quieter than in the past. New ideas get bounced around, and new discoveries are still being made — for example, in June 2020, it was discovered that the music in ♐DELOCK appears to be a manipulated version of “Homesick”, recorded by Bailey’s Lucky Seven. This would seemingly be confirmed by (and explains) the hitherto-obscure comment “HOMESICKDELOCK” in the final G+ post.
On June 1, 2022, the Unfavorable Semicircle twitter account (@unfavorablesem) became active for the first time since its founding in March 2019, posting a series of tweets in a short period of time. They included a quotation from the UFSC discord, what appears to be a more complete version of the various composites found in the BRILL group as well as versions of the ♐LOCK and ♐GOLDEN composites, a link to a song and some commentary and a promise to answer questions from the community. It is unclear if the person posting the tweets account is an actual author of UFSC or merely someone who has assumed control of the account.
Take a look at the theories page as well as the Timeline, and the List of Things Accomplished/Tried.
We’re a fairly active community, dedicated to solving this mystery. There is a lot of work to be done! Because there are so many unknown parts to this phenomenon, a wide variety of skills are required. Coding, video editing and sound engineering are being employed to try and figure this out, but even if you don’t know anything about those fields, your own particular expertise (as well as your questions and your analytical mind) is still important!
https://reddit.com/r/UnfavorableSemicircle
https://discord.gg/0153LdFL1F3RQmns9
Links to archives of the original videos can be found here.