Unfavorable-Semicircle-Wiki

♐DELOCK

♐DELOCK is a video posted to the original UFSC YouTube channel on December 29, 2015. It was the first video posted after a lengthy hiatus. (The previous postings were the OR videos on August 8th.) This video in particular has garnered a larger amount of attention as it was among the first non-series videos discovered on the original account.

The ♐DELOCK visual is generally considered to be an iconic image in the UFSC canon.

A sped up GIF of ♐DELOCK

Description of video

The video is 2:52 in duration. The video shows a white grid-like shape n a black background. Colored pixels shift around the grid.

Audio

The video’s audio track contains a dual mono audio track with “calliope”/ragtime-type music, which had originally been compared to the sounds in the cartoon Steamboat Willie. The Unknown Voice spels out a series of letters near the beginning (similar to the spelling of “FREEBIRD3” in MAX_TEND).

Audio analysis

alexbassguy’s Analysis

This is the analysis of discord user alexbassguy: “After a careful review, it’s not Steamboat Willie. BUT - I can say with some confidence that the audio is definitely like Steamboat Willie. I.e., early cartoon music with sound effects. It could be from one of hundreds of old cartoons. But I think it’s audio from an old Tom and Jerry or something, with sound effects over orchestral music in the background, very much like Steamboat Willie.”

To test this concept, he created a re-creation: “I… used a snippet of Steamboat Willie to recreate what I hear in DELOCK, here’s what I came up with. It’s close, and the techniques I employed here could (with some variation) create DELOCK.”

{see discord discussion in #solving on 2020-02-08}

“Homesick”

On June 19, 2020, Discord user Freezepond observed that the music in ♐DELOCK appears to be a manipulated version of “Homesick”, recorded by Bailey’s Lucky Seven. (Gennett 4979, the b-side to “Carolina In The Morning”.) This would seemingly be confirmed by (and explains) the hitherto-obscure comment “HOMESICKDELOCK” in the final G+ post.

“I am not H”

Original analysis identified the spoken text near the beginning as “IANNOP6”.

Further research by discord user Dom “[t]ook a closer look at the spoken letters in ♐DELOCK, comparing them to the master (ABC…) track. They spell out ‘I AM NOT H’ when you take the spaces into account.”

I am not H

Dom further observes: “I compared the waveforms for each letter to get this result. Here’s an example for the last letter. You can see it matches the ‘H’ waveform significantly better than the ‘8’ one. I had similar findings with ‘N’ and ‘M’”.

H vs 8

The meaning of “H” remains open to conjecture.

{see discord discussion in #on-topic-misc on 2021-05-18}

Possible significance of the audio

Both “Homesick” and “Away Down East In Maine” (the song used as the sound-source for ♐RETIO) were on 78 RPM singles recorded in 1922. Discord user Unfavorablist observed that that year is “significant in terms of copyright. After the Disney/Steamboat Willie copyright extension, nothing after 1922 entered the public domain in the U.S. until recently.” (Further discussion in this article.)

Relationship to original unnamed series

Some of the numbered videos from the Original unnamed series appear to be snippets of ♐DELOCK. (reference)

♐DELOCK audio comparison

This screenshot by discord user Unfavorablist shows the audio from ♐DELOCK open at the bottom with several fragments from the Original unnamed series aligned in corresponding positions.

Significance and meaning

Due to the name, it has long been suspected that this video is the key to deciphering any concealed messages that other videos might contain.

Deadlock

Reddit user AvarisX31 has suggested that there might be a conceptional relationship with the computation concept of “deadlock”, described as “a state in which each member of a group is waiting for some other member to take action, such as sending a message or more commonly releasing a lock.”

There is a visual affinity with the UFSC ♐DELOCK image and an illustration of the concept in the wiki article:

By Marble machine - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47970297

2021 investigations

In 2021 some further investigaton was done on ♐LOCK, ♐DELOCK and ♐UPRIGHT by Discord users.

On July 28, @Daxterapid got a script running that prints the hue of any one pixel every frame on delock, I chose (50, 50) as it’s in the middle and mostly away from the white lines. And it appears it’s not the same color the entire video through, but I think that’s from compression or something, i.e the pixel above has an effect on its hue because the image is sort of blurry.

♐DELOCK color map by Daxterapid

On August 4, @tukkek posted a video tracking individual change in color:

https://www.unfavorablesemicircle.com/DELOCK.delta.mp4

The same user would then on August 5, create a new video based on an idea by @Kai45:

Kai45: Has anyone else noticed that Upright matches with Delock although it’s off-center? The bottom left area of Upright has the center square of Delock and the lines around it match up as well. tukkek: i followed through @Kai45’s idea and rebuilt ♐DELOCK from ♐UPRIGHT. im not adjusting for the panning or boundaries changing yet but i can try to go the extra mile if an interesting idea in how to apply this to ♐DELOCK shows up.

https://www.unfavorablesemicircle.com/UPRIGHT.puzzle.mp4