A PETSCII Message from "Hooked On A Feeling" Blue Swede Singer Björn Skifs Decoded on Commodore 64 

On paper, it would definitely be hard to tell the difference between many characters, but the good news is that once you make mental notes of the minor differences in positioning, then you'll be able to tell the difference between a bit better.

"My friends and I used to write secret messages in school using Runic from our Ultima manuals" is the best sentence I'll read all week. I love RU-vid comments!

Oh, if I had found that interview while researching this that would have been the perfect way to close this video!! It did "happen again" but not how he expected it :) Thanks for letting me know.

The amounts look like a time. Gives a whole new meaning to "time is money".

I was looking for this. Thanks

"they just get rounded to nearest 1 Crown at the register" - So, first they use deceiving prices like 199.99 to trick you into thinking it's "less than 200" and then they charge you 200 anyway? What a scam! 🙂

@@mhausb6436 The game is rigged! Although you can save _up to 49 öre_ (it rounds down, too, and it's just the total which is rounded, not individual items) which is like... 5 US cents!

@@TaramiBedona And I hear you rarely use cash in Sweden anyway, so it's probably no big deal.

Yes, I hope so too. I wish I could have played longer clips but it's too risky.

hmm. B J Thomas was a performer of "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" but the song was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David

"Hooked on a Feeling" was written by Mark James and to confirm the other commenter, "Raindrops keep falling on my head" was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. BJ Thomas was an extremely underrated artist IMO. Great voice and presentation.

​@@keithparker1346 I see. Well, B. J. Thomas was the original singer hired by the writers in both cases. And his voice is a reason they were (original) hits. Not the same as recording a cover of a famous song and hoping for it to hit the charts again! We are supposed to build on the shoulders of giants, not replace them or diminish them. ;) And embrace originality. Regarding 'suede'. 1784! -> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can%27t_Help_Falling_in_Love Random bit of trivia: Who had a first hit of Red Red Wine INB4 UB40? :)

Thank you Björn! :)

@@8_Bit The letter "ö" is prononunced like the French -eux, if you feel the need to show off your Swedish sometime :)

I straight up thought it was Blue Suede, and I always thought of the previous name as “Blue Blues” rather than the piece of clothing. Probably because I heard the names before I could read them:) (And I grew up in Sweden so heard a ton of Björn Skifs in Swedish as well.)

I'm pretty sure that most American DJs pronounced it "swayed" and just ignored the spelling. The same thing happened with Bachman-Turner Overdrive, which is pronounced "Backman". But hey, if they're playing your music, you don't complain.

Fellow ABBAnatic here. The Arbiter is a great song with a very 80s video clip! I like how the lyrics mention "I'll be watching all 64"... Bjorn must've been a real C64 fan 😆

claes af geijerstam!

@@ExperimentIV Clabbe to you and me

Thanks, though this one was thanks to a great tip from a viewer.

What the hell are those emojis?

@@mirabilis

@@aresaurelian wut

Thank you again for bringing this to my attention! In addition to the PETSCII, it's been fun to listen to. Some great '80s sounds and songs.

Yes, I think that may have been his favourite Canadian band at the time of choosing that handle :)

Interesting tidbits - since you mentioned KISS, it's interesting that Bryan Adams/Jim Vallance also wrote songs for KISS - including "War Machine", which sounds nothing like an Adams/Vallance song :D Also, Eric Carr (drummer for KISS until his death in 91) has a co-write on "Don't Leave Me Lonely" on the Cuts Like a Knife album (and although he was just given a co-write, it's pretty clear he came to them with the complete song and they just changed it a bit).

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZTWHA9abaWs.html - live in Rio to ~200000 people, with Eric Carr on drums and Vinnie Vincent on guitar, who used to play with Dan Hartman (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jW-OfaiBs9k.html) and later started Vinnie Vincent's Invasion, which morphed into the band Slaughter ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-IYNJMsaAlW0.html - Bryan Adams doesn't remember the words :) The music industry is very incestuous ;)

Ö is somewhat similar to the English sound ‘i’ in the word ‘bird’. Or ‘u’ in the word ‘fur’. Or ‘ea’ in the word ‘heard’.

Yes, it was on their 1977 album "Come and Join Us". It's got a really epic intro.

Yeah, I had to watch this video at 1.5x speed too and skip forward a few times. I normally like Robin's stuff but he talks so slowly and waffled on way too long. 26 minutes to reveal two sentences he could have read off the key caps is too much.

I remember being shocked by Bruce Cockburn's falsetto in "Beautiful Creatures" recently, but I just looked it up and that was from 2006 :) I still listen to a fair bit of new music but I don't think it's very mainstream, and it seems most of it has women vocalists, so I don't really have any modern falsetto examples to suggest. I hope somebody's still doing it somewhere! :)

@@8_Bit I had to look up Beautiful Creatures, and wow I was *not* expecting him to go there that soon, that easily, or that often in that song! Thanks!

Just something I recorded some years ago. I wish I had a more on-topic song to play, but I couldn't think of anything that wouldn't de-monetize or copyright strike the video.

@@8_Bit that's cool. It was a beautiful piece! ❤️

Your comment made me realize I didn't explain that well! Pressing Shift+Commodore switches between the two character sets built into the Commodore 64. The default one is the "graphic" character set, with upper case letters and when shifted, the graphic characters (like the spade symbol on A). The other character set is the "mixed" or "lowercase" set that has lower case letters by default, and when shifted, upper case letters. So switching sets like that instantly converts all the graphic symbols into their uppercase equivalents.

@@8_Bit thanks for the explanation!

That limit of 2 (significant) character variable names is very deeply embedded in the BASIC and it would be a fair bit of work to extend it unfortunately.

I don't remember hearing "Voices" before, but I like it! I briefly misunderstood your sentence as "...has apologized TO Bryan Adams..." and didn't catch your drift until I watched the linked video :)

Not death metal exactly, but Björn Skifs could totally show up on a Katatonia album. That would, in fact, be awesome.

@@TaramiBedona Katatonia certainly USED to be a death metal band. Now they are a different kind of awesome.

haha, I had to look up surströmming - very smelly!! :)

Sorry! We always hear the "Beorn" pronunciation here, I guess due to its English connection with Tolkien and bears, etc?

Sorry you feel that way. I'm genuinely interested in everything I put in this video; I had a lot of fun listening to this record and looking into all the song writers, I actually encouraged viewers to jump ahead to the next chapter if they're not into these sorts of details, and I always take the time to make a chapter index for the viewer who might want to jump ahead or skim the contents. I also care as much about the potential meaning of the hidden/extended title just as much as the decoding, and all that context I give earlier in the video directly contributes to my suggestion of what it means. It all ties together: it's a story. And it's one I was oblivious to until I explored all the avenues and connected the dots. I would have found it very unsatisfactory to just convert PETSCII graphics to a string of English words, read it out, and said "thanks for watching." As for the length, it's the shortest video I've released since September 2022, so I dunno. I research and plan the video, I shoot the video, I edit the video, and that's the length it is. I don't target any particular length.

@@8_Bit S'arrite though... I love all of the OTHER videos and have been subscribed for a very long time. I still imagine you saw the petscii and immediately coverted it to alpha characters in your head. I think you're THAT smart.

@@erroneus00 I only knew about half of them :) The card symbols, quarter-circles, "L" right angles and slashes are easy. It's the straight vertical and horizontal lines that are difficult to tell apart / memorize.

I think that's exactly what I was trying to say :) A lutfisk (open-faced?) sandwich?

@@8_Bit räka means shrimp

Oh yeah, lutfisk & shrimp open-faced sandwich! Sorry, I was just trying to find a silly "stereotypical" Swedish thing, and it seemed to me that putting lutfisk on top of something else Swedish would make it really Swedish. Like how I ride a moose to get some maple syrup poutine here in Canada.

He really does!