The World is Really Crazy.

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At the moment I am at level 52 in the game. I have cleaned out much of the horror that occupied Solstheim so I have returned back to do what I can to clean up Skyrim.

I have decided to add a traveling companion. Her name is Mjoll the Lioness. She has a strong accent. But she is a good fighter. FEARLESS. At least she can use a bow. I had some companions along my journey but I lost them. They disappeared and I surmised they died in battle somewhere along the way. Sometimes they returned after a few days but if they don't the only logical conclusion I can arrive at is someone or something took them out. But Mjoll may be a winner.

Mjoll is a lost soul locking for a mission in life and just wanting to be part of something and a reason for living.

Glad your back Jimmy m……hope for continual recovery .

It's nice to have you back. I hope you continue to recover.

Thanks for your words of encouragement.

Skyrim is probably the only computer game I spent much time with in the past ten years with one other notable exception, Endless Space 2 (which has a lot of the old Masters of Orion 2 charm in a somewhat upgraded capacity).

For stroke-related brain damage and finding things changing in both directions (ie. new capabilities as much as new challenges), I remember hearing that our brains have a great deal of inhibition built in, enough to where a significant quantity of what's there is holding dynamic equilibrium against other parts and they mentioned that people who were dealing with frontal lobe dementia could sometimes have bursts of artistic creativity due to breakdown in various inhibitory structures. In a way what got disconnected was both active and inhibitory and it sounds like you're experimenting with something like a different deck of cards with different capabilities.

Wish you the best of luck in your continued recovery and hopefully with time the other 20% will catch back up. On a side note - Robert Greene (author of 48 Rules of Power) went through a pretty intense stroke, hit a lot of his motor capabilities, and he spent several years recently relearning all sorts of things he'd taken for granted.

The type of stroke I had falls into the category called Aphasia and it hit one of the most severe forms. After the stroke I lost my ability to read. All the letters broke apart and became an entirely different alphabet system, one I could not read or interpret. It didn't affect my ability to write, only my ability to read. It also affected my knowledge of words. I lost about 99 percent of my words. The only ones I could communicate with were words that I hardly if ever used. For example, words like Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious survived, whereas words like Cat and Dog were lost.

am glad you have come as far as you have jimmy m.....

Things in the game of SKYRIM are getting weirder and weirder. I am at level 54 in the game. I have joined up with Mjoll the Lioness. She has a strong accent. But she is a good fighter. FEARLESS. She is like a lost soul. And she knows how to use a bow which I am still a little weak at.

My character is growing strength very quickly now. I heard there was a hidden place where I might seek some unique training. It is called Fort Dawnguard. It is the home base of a small group of Vampire Hunters. So I went there and began exploring the region. It is in really bad shape and may soon be taken over by an army of vampires. So I joined their quest and went to war.

Well one of my battles produced something I didn't expect. In their massive dungeon I found sealed in a small chamber a vampire. Her name is Serana. She is a very strange and unique character. She is ancient. She is perhaps the first vampire. So in playing the game I have a rule. If something doesn't try and kill me I do not try and kill them. So I decided to take her back home. She lives in a vampire fortress that is hidden on the other side of Skyrim called Castle Valkinar.

So I took her there so I could drop her off. Well this did not go well. At the main door, they would not let me in. This is probably because I am not a vampire. I knew of a back door, so I traveled and fought my way to the door. But it was locked. I do not remember it being locked before. But I guess when I played the game before, I was a vampire. Thus I have a problem.

I tried to turn Serana free and leave this region. Well that didn't work. She doesn't listen to me. She does what SHE wants and in this case she is a tag along. Now she is somewhat unique. She has one of the Elder Scrolls. She won't let me see it. But that is her decision (it is hers after all). So what to do? I guess I now have two characters that will come on the adventure of their lives with me. We fought though a massive underground fortress and we seemed to work well together. So I guess stranger things can happen in the world.

Meanwhile my character is becoming stronger and stronger each day. He is almost off the charts.

As I said earlier, I suffered a massive stroke. It caused a brain loss known as Aphasia. Most people who experience this loss are damaged for the rest of their lives. There is a magic time period where some recovery is possible. This generally last for around 3 months and then your brain goes into a lockdown mode. Somehow I broke through part of this loss and partially recovered.

Immediately right after my stroke I was affected in two ways by Aphasia. First I lost my ability to read words. I would stare at words and they broke apart right before my eyes and the letters fractured and became new letters, an entirely different alphabet system. One I could not read. As if that wasn't enough I also lost knowledge of around 99 percent of my words and the only words that remained were words that I barely if ever used. These were words like Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious used in the movie Mary Poppins.

After giving this some thought, I have come to the conclusion that after my stroke, I lost my knowledge of ALL WORDS. Every last one. You see the word Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is not really a word but rather a part of a song. So what actually survived after my stroke was MUSIC. Music was stored away in a different part of the brain than my knowledge of words.

Now this is brought home by one trait that some people exhibit called stuttering. A good example appeared on television program called “America’s Got Talent”. In the program Amanda Mammana, 19, performed an original song while playing the guitar after she informed the judges about her speech impediment.



So what is actually happening here? There are TWO DIFFERENT REGIONS OF THE BRAIN that are interconnected. These are Speech and Music. They reside in different areas of the BRAIN. There is a paper titled "From singing to speaking: facilitating recovery from nonfluent aphasia" by Gottfried Schlaug et. al. [Future Neurol. 2010 Sep; 5(5): 657-665, doi: 10.2217/fnl.10.44].

The paper begins with "It has been reported for more than 100 years that patients with severe nonfluent aphasia are better at singing lyrics than they are at speaking the same words."

Very good info to learn about , differences in areas of the brain that identify music and lyrics,
versus normal speech . Have read that alzheimer patients seem to recall music from their youth and become more alert when played back to them.

^Yep....I've seen studies which found that the above is absolutely true.

Music from their era does make a person with Alzheimers more alert and more happy.

Back to the game called Skyrim

It really is a very strange game. There are two separate worlds in the game. A world of the living and a world of the undead. Four times during the game, I have crossed over into the World of the Undead. It is a terrible world and everything inside is trying to end my life. But a visit does provide me with special items. During my last visit I obtained a very strange item. Well it is not really an item, it is Dremora Merchant. He is from the world of the undead and he runs a black market. He sells very exceptional items.

Once every day or two, I call him forth and conduct trades. He can buy around 2,000 gold pieces of items off me and he sells around 4 items (weapons/armor) worth at least four times more money. So I am slowly building up an array of some of the best equipment available (Daedric). As a result my warfighting ability has grown by leaps and bounds and it is becoming rather rare for any creature to kill me.

At the present point in the game, I am exploring the world of Skyrim you might say ON MY TERMS. It is a lot easier to explore this wide nation when you don't get killed every few minutes. I have one character named Mjoll the Lioness who has joined up with me as we explore this world. I have equipped her with some of the best weapons and armor available. So she is a very effective fighting force. But then I have a tag-along. Her name is Serana. She may be one of the first original Vampires that came into this world. She has her own personality. The main problem I am dealing with is (other than killing her), there is no way for me to make her leave. I took her to her world in the far reaches of Skyrim called Castle Volkihiar. They wouldn't let me in their main door (probably because I wasn't a Vampire and I could probably kill every last one of them). I went to the back hidden door behind the complex and it was looked shut. So I have decided to have two characters join me on the quest.

Well I did run into one problem. In my journey, I met another character who needed my help. His mother had entered a very deep dungeon and never came back and he decided to go in and try and find her. It was a massive crypt. We worked our way down to the bottom level and were attacked by a wave of powerful foes. The battle lasted only a minute or two but something strange occurred. In battle because of the tight quarters sometimes you not only strike your enemies but also your friends by accident.

Now when I accidentally strike a friend, I normally hear someone scream out "What are you doing? I'm on your side." But when an accidental strike between Mjoll the Lioness and Serana occurs in the midst of battle, this leads to an all out war between the two. This was a strange, strange, strange problem. So I did the only thing that made any sense at all. I fled the area as quickly as I could and made it to the surface. As a result both girls followed me and by the time they reached the surface, they were best friends again.

I am still working my way across Skyrim, going to one village and town after another. Mjoll the Lioness and Serana seem to be getting along. Every now and then they try and kill each other but I move out of the area and they come to their senses. Having Serana in my team is really strange. She keeps bringing dead characters back to lives as Zombies. These are weird zombies because they only last for a few minutes and then they explode. Oh well, what a strange game. I would not normally want a Vampire on my team but SHE WON'T LEAVE.

I have visited around 90 percent of the various inhabitants in Skyrim. Soon I will call this phase done and move onto the next phase and wage war with the one character that has made it his mission to destroy this world.

Well it finally happened. Mjoll the Lioness disappeared. I do not know if she died or is just away for awhile. The last thing I remembered was that we were down a deep gully filled with snow and ice and then we were attacked. I hope she comes back. They do sometimes. I miss her.