packbat

60% of one day's wordcount, and I've kicked things off with a literal bang. Unfortunately, I've a headache, $2.50 of iced coffee I don't want, 1/3 of a brownie I don't want, and a bit of a block.

I guess I just need to remind myself, as the Bard once said, to "lay on - and curst be he who first cries, 'Halt, enough!'"

Coming from the maggiebloomes and the active_apathys, with appropriate edits/redactions¹:

The first ten respondents to this post making the request shall get probably-crappy sketches from me, word- or pencil-. However, they have to make a similar offer on their own blog, or be forever² dubbed a freeloader.

1. I suppose I could leave the whole "of a pairing" language in, but (a) I have no fanficcing experience and (b) my fandoms pretty much comprise, first, the original Dragnet series with Jack Webb, second, most of the Hal Clement canon, and third, Castle.

OhgodImentionedaNathanFillionshowIshouldleavenowbye.

2. Length of forever may vary. Offer not valid in parts of Alaska south of 51° 15' 43" north latitude. Limit one per customer.

Let's face it. You're in a blog rut.

Most of the time, you write about more of the same kinda stuff that you usually write about.

Maybe it's your day-to-day life, the stuff you did. Maybe it's topical news response. Maybe it's short fiction. Maybe it's re-linking random stuff you see on the internet. Maybe it's LOLCAT porn. (I hope it's not LOLCAT porn.) Maybe it's here on LiveJournal, or it's over on Vox, or Blogspot or Blogger or Blogblog or Postablogablowablog, or WordPress or Facebook or FacePress or FacePlant or maybe it's just your Twitter account. It's what you're comfortable with, I know, I know...

...but why not try doing something different, just for a day?

Tuesday. January 27th. Rabbit Hole Day is coming.

Pass it on.

What makes you feel better when you're mad? Submitted By kimmayeisblack View other answers

Tried this a few times before, but I suppose I'll give it another go:

Day 16: Jeff begun spoiling. Lonely.

Via the_zaniak here and failegaidin before him:

Put your music player of choice on shuffle (all music, or at least your Top Rated playlist), and wrote a story for the first ten songs that played. You can only write for the duration of the song. Concept, execution, final draft - you have between 90 seconds and 10 minutes to write each story. (depending on how long your music is, of course.) If you want to fix up the writing, post it separately - this is to show quick, raw work.

For once, I'm not editing the meme text - it sounds pretty good already. Raw writing, ho!

---

( Song 1... )

---

Postmortem: Oh, for another thirty seconds apiece! But I think it was a good exercise.

(Humorous: the very next song - see the current music line - is 8:08.)

Remember my entry last Monday? Did you know my house is just about 4° off compass?

Yeah, I didn't either. Can I get a "not cool"?

Let's start with my door, shall we? Bedroom door, closed at night because the light on the corner of the industrial park shines right down the hallway, and it's aligned just about like this:

           ,.
     ___---\ ,
\*---       '
'

(The asterisk is the hinge, the dashes and underscores are the door, the backslashes and periods and commas and primes are the frame. Yeah, I'm no ASCII master.)

Now, during rotation, the door remains constant length, right? And length is measured by max(x,y), right? Therefore, rotation goes like:

|......./
|      /:
|...../ :
|    /: :
|.../ : :
|  /: : :
| / : : :
|/  : : :
*--------

...with the end sliding north first, then west.

Now look at the diagram of my door again. Think about it for a second. Odds are you'll draw the right conclusion.

Welcome to my day.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to see if my digestive system is less pooched than the plumbing. Oh, and mop the bathroom floor.

Wish me luck.

1. True AI is fairly new - perhaps as new as the Internet is now.
2. At some point early on, it has been established that AIs are legal persons.
3. An AI breaks the law in a way that would normally confer the death penalty.
4. Its sentence: to be reprogrammed - not killed - so that it will not do it again.

The story follows the hacker or hackers employed to do the job.

So it's the top of the fifth, zero to zero with one out. Unseasonably cold – temps in the low sixties – mostly cloudy, with a breeze coming in from left field. Four times already runners have made it to third and died there. Bruce Alter is at bat.

Jeremiah Meiners whisks in six pitches: a ball, a strike, a strike, a foul, a foul, and Alter hits a grounder to the shortstop that almost beats him to first base – one man on, with the home team manager disputing the play. Eric Allen behind him takes one-two-three balls and a strike before getting a walk to first. Adam Baker knocks his second pitch off a grounder towards first base for a single, jumping over the first baseman, Tim Park, as the latter tries to recover the ball. Bases loaded, one out. Mark Tracy steps up, fouls, watches a ball go by, and shoots one to the shortstop – it goes to the plate to catch Alter out at home. Bases loaded, two outs, and Beau Brooks comes up to bat.

Steve comments approvingly. He's an old-time baseball fan, was talking about Harold Baines Sr. (father of the left-fielder) a few minutes ago, and he thinks Brooks's got a good name. Dad replies, I'm keeping the score.

Meiners throws the first pitch, a ball. Brooks fouls off the next one, lets a strike by, fouls again. A ball. Another ball. Foul. Foul.

Over the right-field fence.

Pandemonium. The visitors are cheering, the runners are circling the bases. First grand slam we can remember in this stadium, and it's simply beautiful. The runners go into the dugout and the fielders get ready for the next batter when the second base umpire comes running in to talk to the home plate ump.* They retrieve the bat. They talk. They measure it against the plate.

Suddenly, the fielders run in. Someone says it was an out, some sort of illegal play. I'm yelling at the announcer, in the booth behind me, "What happened? What's going on?" No-one off the field knows, as on the field the visiting coach fiercely argues the call, and in the stands an unknown home-teamer taunts him. We hear something about an illegal bat from the umpires before the visitors take the field. Four runs vanish from the scoreboard.

Two innings later, scoreless despite two more runners making third, we learn that the bat had pine tar too far up the handle – halfway, it seems like. Steve talks about major-leaguers who've gotten away with it in the past. We watch to the end, as first the visitors score a run in the seventh and the home team two in the eighth, one on a shortstop's error that's officially counted as a hit. The game ends in the top of the ninth with a nail-biting infield play for the final out at first base while a runner tries to come in from third. The wind has died down as we leave the field, and Dad gives directions to Steve for his trip home. The bout ended at 10:23, almost three-and-a-half hours.

I love this game.

Note: The above was the fifth game of the season for the Silver Spring - Takoma Thunderbolts, playing against the Rockville Express at their home field behind Montgomery Blair High School for the Cal Ripkin, Sr. Collegiate Baseball League.

* Update: According to the official news, Thunderbolts coach John Duffy initiated the check of the bat. The Express protested the decision to the League on the afternoon of June 15.

Update the Second: The appeal was rejected, as it did not come before play resumed.

I know this is not what Illustration Friday is technically about, but what the hey.

( This week's topic is 'Quiet', suggested by Giles (http://www.choble.com/) )

Back in 1994, a rather well-known physicist named Murray Gell-Mann wrote a book called The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. Back in, hmm, August, I checked a copy out of the library.

I'm not done with it yet. But judging it so far, there's an important lesson I think people should learn, here, in writing books or articles on popular science. And it comes down to these two things: rigor and readability. You can be exactly right, or you can be easily understood. Being both is hard or impossible. In this case, Gell-Mann was writing a popular science book, so he wanted to be understood. But he is a physicist, and used to exactness*, and he let that lead him into a big mistake: he tried to stay precise – correct – without spending the time to explain the definitions.

This is unbelievably important. Unless you spend the time to make definitions, you cannot be precise. 90% of confusions are definitions or semantics.

Scientists are probably worse off here than anyone else, since they're used to talking with people who already know the definitions. But if you want to explain it to people who don't, you have to fudge it or spend a lot of time working it out.

This has been another installment of "Robin Pretends To Know All Theatre". Thank you for coming.

* For all the jokes that science guys make about the philosophy guys**, they do have this in common: they both define words very precisely. Defining words precisely is absolutely necessary to clear and correct reasoning on any difficult subject.

** Q: How do you get a philosopher off your porch? A: Pay him for the pizza. Q: What does the liberal arts major say to the science major? A: "Would you like fries with that?"

First, another vocabulary term: "diablerie". It is a word which, according to my mother's turn-of-the-century dictionary, refers either to devilry and mischief or to magic arts and incantations.* Chesterton uses in the latter sense, as implying devilish magic – a use I found quite evocative.

That facility with language is actually the first characteristic I want to mention in my review. G. K. Chesterton is a good writer. I compared him to Dorothy Sayers, to Jerome K. Jerome, and to Charles Dickens – I stand by each of those comparisons, that to Dickens the most. His language is literate, it is evocative, and, most importantly, it is precise. Like a classical artist, Chesterton simultaneously makes his language beautiful in itself and makes it always serve the story.

Ah, but the story...! I cannot appreciate it.

( The following contains spoilers of the worst kind - spoilers for the ending. It also contains spoilers for the middle, and to a lesser degree for the beginning. If you wish to read this novel from a state of ignorance - although I do not recommend it, in this case - do not continue. )

* "Diablerie" is also a term which, according to Wikipedia, refers to a particular action that can be taken in the Vampire: the Masquerade et al. games from White Wolf. I image a number of modern readers will have a pretty odd reaction when they see the word in The Man Who Was Thursday.

Mysticism is a rational experience. Religion is not. The mystic has recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion. The mystic has reasons for what he believes, and these reasons are empirical. The roiling mystery of the world can be analyzed with concepts (this is science), or it can be experienced free of concepts (this is mysticism). Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial—at once full of hope and full of fear—of the vastitude of human ignorance.

A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion, because spiritual experience, ethical behavior, and strong communities are essential for human happiness. And yet our religious traditions are intellectually defunct and politically ruinous. While spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind, we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it. Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith.

That was the end of the penultimate chapter of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris. The final chapter is the Epilogue, which in all honesty reads like an extended summary. I think the book truly ends with the above.

I find myself in a curious position relative to this book. Harris seems to oscillate between the roles of the angry atheist and the modern mystic, almost without pattern, while speaking chiefly in the style of the objective observer. He is entirely contemptuous of the modern idea of religious tolerance – he seems to believe that religious beliefs (while protected the same as any other beliefs) should be accorded the same degree of respect (or even a lesser degree) as alien abduction beliefs. On the other hand, as is evident above, he believes spirituality and mysticism (neither of which, he states, are accurate terms for what he speaks of, as they do not connote the "reasonableness and profundity of the possibility [...] that there is a form of well-being that supersedes all others, [...] that transcends the vagaries of experience itself") are not only rational, but necessary.

I am being unfair.

I can say honestly that the book is not badly written – in fact, though dry in parts, I daresay it is well-written. Harris makes arrogant claims, but defends them with facts, logic, and references (not all of which I find convincing – for example, a book titled "The Case for Israel" does not sound to me in my state of ignorance like an objective source). His claims include many which I agree with, mostly about the flaws of religion (for I am an atheist myself, and occasionally prone to anger), and many claims which I consider absurd (for I am an atheist myself, and as dismissive of mystical claims as religious ones). He makes heavy use of endnotes (my count is 63 pages out of 281) for both citations and for extended side arguments, and provides an extensive bibliography and useful index.

However, I don't like the book. I think his conclusions are too strong for the academic tone he seems to be trying to maintain, and I think some of his basic premises – well, specifically his premise that spirituality in some form is a necessity – are far from obvious. (I, being uncharitable, attribute his shortage of skepticism towards psychic phenomena to his mystic stance as well, and condemn him in my mind for it.) My greatest objection is that I cannot imagine his book will be useful; he speaks at times as if all religious tenets are obviously risible, which would seem to be turnoff to most theists, and at other times as if his mystical beliefs are obviously reasonable, which would seem to be a turnoff to most atheists.

Again, I am being unfair.

Bah! I am a useless reviewer. I would not recommend reading the book – I think the good fellows of the Internet Infidels (who have on their site their review of the book, which is far more positive (and heavily cited) than mine) and the members of their forum would be a better resource for those curious about the arguments against religion. If you are interested in atheistic ethics and spirituality, Chapters 6 and 7 respectively might be of interest, but he does not go into great depth. If you are interested in arguments against confidence in religious pluralism and against supporting religious moderates, the remainder of the book might be of interest. Otherwise, I do not believe it will be of great interest.

I think that's all I have to say about the book. Sam Harris has a website he cites in the dust jacket. It links many positive reviews of the book (giving somewhat the lie to my idea that most readers would reject it), and has some info on related topics as well as an apparently large forum community.

Nothing. Three hours walking, and nothing.

I walked easily at first, just went straight away from the river on a nice thoroughfare, but nothing happened. I walked past a house after the first couple corners, and past a windmill at a distance of a couple hundred feet after that, and then I was just in the middle of the fields. I walked through them for an hour before I began to get suspicious, and after two hours I turned around.

The river was right there. I might as well have been on the Red Queen's raceway – it took me all of forty minutes to get back to the public house from there. No point in trying this anymore – next step, I don't know. I guess I'll walk around town again. Maybe the sun will come up in a few hours, I don't know.

Having dressed, I took a minute or two to decide which picture I should enter.

I have four Escher prints on my walls: Night and Day, Reptiles, Three Worlds, and Puddle. (That last one is the one with (surprisingly enough) a puddle that has the tire tracks and footprints running through and past it. I honestly forgot the title – I had to look it up myself.) Now, while I could enter any of them, a moment's thought revealed to me that (a) Night and Day is looking down from rather a dangerous height (hence the breeze), (b) Reptiles shows nothing but a table, so it might be difficult to get anywhere, and (c) Three Worlds is perched above a substantial body of water. That left (d), Puddle. Having thus decided, I carefully cleared the bookshelf under the poster, climbed onto it, and stepped into the picture.

Do you remember that scene in Monsters, Inc. when the main characters are jumping through all those closet doors? Remember that one where they jumped through the door that was horizontal and falling, and when they got out they fell sideways, because that was now down? Well, it wasn't that severe, but the change of gravity did hit me, going through the poster. I did manage to land on my feet, though.


I stood and looked around. Comfortingly, the frame of the poster through which I entered was still present, hanging with a cheerful indifference to gravity some seven feet above the ground. The road on which I stood was muddy, just as depected – it passed through tilled fields, but I could see little else. It was night.

A sudden impulse caught me, and I looked up. Gleaming, in the air, I saw a triangle of bright white birds flying by, their brightness all out of keeping with the dimness of the night. "I'm in Night and Day", I realized, happily. "Hofstadter was right; they are all connected behind the scenes." With this to fortify me, I paused to take notes (I want to make this as complete a narrative as possible), and set off down the road, towards the sounds of water and the distant birds.

---

I walked for about half an hour before I reached the outskirts of the town. I passed through a few more fields before crossing a bridge – I could see a river from there, but the bridge was over a feeder stream. Actually, it was probably a canal – streams aren't that straight.

Anyway, the road paralleled the river for a distance, with fields on the other side, until it made a sharp turn in front of a pair of buildings. (There was a line of ships steaming down the river – I feel I should mention those.) Fortunately for me, the one I approached seemed to be some sort of public house or inn, and I was able to go in.

Um, Escher was Dutch, I think. And I was reminded of this, very strongly, when I discovered that all the signs were in Dutch or German or something. A few minutes of gesticulation with the bartender served to inform me that (1) I could get a glass (well, mug) of water (I tried saying "wasser", because I thought that was the German for it), and (2) no, it wouldn't cost anything. This was most fortunate, as I had no Dutch money. I guess I'll have to leave American dollars as a tip.

I just noticed that they have wireless internet here. I have no idea if it's the same Internet as back home – for all I know, it could be that the school's Internet can cross the border of the poster. But on the off-chance that it is, I'll go ahead and post this now. Then I'll see what else I can find.

The drawing class studio was ... disorderly is probably the word. There were the strange, rectangular frames stacked towards one wall (they looked like a modern art exhibit, but were probably some kind of stools), a strange miscellany of artifacts, mostly in unusable condition, littering another wall, and a sort of low, large table in the middle. My imagination suggested that the models might pose on that table when the time came for students to draw them.

One of the first things I tried to do, waiting in the room for class to start, was identify the purpose of the debris in the rear. My eye caught a skeleton - for anatomy lessons, perhaps, though it was broken. A tricycle, sans wheels, lay on its rusted frame several feet away, in the midst of another pile of things. I began to compose a sort of still-life in my head, of a broken skeleton (there was more than one, there may have been a skull I didn't see), lying as if it had fallen from driving the tricycle. It would be a post-apocalyptic scene, perhaps.

After a couple minutes of such contemplation, I decided to perch on one of the numerous round high stools in the room. They were those metal stools, four legs, a circular frame with wood in the middle, another circle acting as a support lower down. I was not even settled when another individual came in - one of those lucky, healthy people who could be thirty or could be fifty. A moment's exchange of words revealed him to be the professor. He advised me to sit in the other half of the room, telling me that he would be speaking from that end. I did so, grabbing for myself a chair with a hard back.

As I sat there, deciding whether to occupy myself with a few moments' drawing or with the reading of more online fiction, the teacher began to arrange the tables and easels for the class. Observing my laptop, he asked me how to connect to the local wireless internet - I answered in a somewhat muddled fashion, but told him what I thought he would need to know. Soon after, he suggested I review the handouts he had spread out before class, and moved on to arrange something else.

There were four handouts, neatly stacked. In a moment, I had gathered a copy of each, and returned to my stool. I was amused to see that the inventory of items I had found for the other drawing section did not apply. Reading through the others (skimming, rather) told me little that was unexpected, and less that I remember, although I was amused to see "John Cage" attributed as author of one of them.

That reading complete, I found myself again dithering over the two options, sketchbook or laptop. In the end, I found myself needing neither - the ten minutes I had to spend vanished well before I reached an conclusion. I grabbed my notebook for the class, and was ready when the teacher began.

Last April, I wrote a review of "The Gate to Women's Country". I want to revisit this review, because it's been nagging at me for a long time.

First, the caveats. I have not, in fact, read the book since that review. Nor have I read other analyses of the book (though I discussed it (very) briefly with my mother once). Further, I am not disowning the earlier review. I wrote it, I meant it, and most of what I said is stuff I honestly haven't changed my opinion on, with one exception.

In my old review, I said "Perhaps I am too harsh on this book." I was, no question. I was, because my entire review was of the shallowest surface of the book.

This is not to say that the surface is irrelevant. As renown blogger Eric Burns said (I feel like Dan Brown!), if the surface isn't good, then any deeper meaning is lost (I'm paraphrasing here). So, the first question to be answered is not, "Is this story perfectly executed", but "Is this story enjoyable as a mere story?" In spite of what I said before, the answer to this question is pretty likely to be "yes".

And since the answer is "yes", we can ask the second question: "Is this story rewarding when considered more deeply?" To which the answer is, "definitely".

In a way, Sheri Tepper's book "The Gate to Women's Country" is not about the plot, it's about the world. And taken from that perspective, it is incredible. It does a far better job than any mere description of the world could, either – it conveys both the beauty of Tepper's invented society and the terrible flaws of it, in a brilliant fashion. The choice of characters and of plot show the world from every side, in the best and in the worst lights. There is tragedy on the order of Greek tragedy, with characters who almost, but don't quite, transcend their destiny. There is even cleverness.

All that said, the world is still flawed. But it is no more flawed than a fictional world should be, in fact it clears that standard by a fair margin, and the truths at the heart of the story remain.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's birthday is one month from today, on January 27. The man is best known as Lewis Carroll, and as Lewis Carroll he is best known for his two books about Alice, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass – wondrous books, and widely loved.

In honor of his birthday, crisper instituted the Annual Livejournal Rabbit Hole Day, to occur on January 27. It is a day for Livejournalists to post blog entries from other universes, for everyone to take a dive through the famous Rabbit Hole to land in another universe. Here's one collection of links to such entries from last year, just as examples of what has been done.

January 27. Spread the word.

Recently, a webcomic artist whose comic I read posted a strip which, unbeknownst to ... em*, duplicated a punchline from another strip, several weeks earlier. Ey got many emails informing em of this, and therefore changed the punchline panel an hour or two after it went up. Ey also posted a note, informing eir readers of the edit.

I could tell who this comic artist was, and what the change was ey made, but I won't – it's irrelevant to this essay. What I'm interested in is the idea that one can publish a work on the web and then change it after it's already been viewed.

( The idea of revising already published works is not new... )

Yesterday, Eric Burns of Websnark wrote an essay about Alzheimer's, dementia, and how scary they are, especially to someone smart like himself who values his mind. It's a really good essay, and it got me thinking about some similar topics.

( If I was someone else... )

The big campus Stuff-You-Can-Do-On-Or-Near-Campus 'fair' was yesterday and today, and I just found out about a creative writing club there. The little handout is relatively sparse, but it appears that they do regular poetry and writing workshops throughout the semester on Monday and Wednesday nights. I missed the first meetings of the semester, but I probably can attend the Wednesday meetings if I get my act together with my homework.

This will be good. The 'eleventh' interest which didn't appear in the interests meme below was 'writing', and regular workshops like this would be a great incentive to write both poetry and fiction. Hopefully they'll send an email out with info on how to sign up, although I'm not sure I should submit anything for review the first time. I hope this will be fun.

From Making Light: The Lyttle Lytton Contest!

As she explains, this contest was made in a similar spirit to the original Bulwer-Lytton contest, but with noticeably different judging criteria. Both were inspired by the oft-maligned opening sentence to Edward George Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford (the original source of "It was a dark and stormy night"). However, the Lyttle Lytton organizer decided that the old contest was biased far too much towards long, convoluted sentences, so he made his require the sentence to be relatively short.

Naturally, this year's contest is already over. Thus, this advertisement is particularly pointless, since submissions won't be judged for over eight months.

Still a cool link, though.

I've had this book for ten days, and I only just finished the first exercise? Summer vacation is more enervating than I thought!

In any case, I thought that, since I wasn't posting very much on this journal, I'd provide the short essay that was assigned as part of Exercise 1 in the book. The exercise was straightforward: I was to read two passages, the 23rd Psalm from the King James Bible and a quote from John Milton's Areopagitica, and analyze their rhythm and figures of speech in a variety of specific ways. The essay was to present the content of these analyses and to suggest which was more effective in presenting its point.


Before the essay, naturally, comes the texts it analyzes. Then the essay, divided into three (very short) sections.

---

( The Twenty-Third Psalm )

( Areopagitica excerpt )

( Analysis of 23rd Psalm )

( Analysis of Areopagitica excerpt )

( Conclusions )

---

Sadly, this is but the first exercise of four in the first chapter. If I want to finish before the semester starts, I'm really going to have to start moving faster. I'm tempted to skip the second one, which is almost exactly like the first, but the passages it asks me to analyze seem even more interesting than the above: they are three excerpts from Virginia Woolf's The Waves.

Ah, well. #3 is an exercise in writing in meter – I'm good at that, and I can probably turn at least one of the lines into a poem to put up here.

Sorry I missed yesterday. I had a paper to finish revisions on and email in, and my section of another paper to complete and email to my group leader. I completed both, however, and I finished a final exam this morning as well.

To make up for the delay, I shall bore you out of your skull with blathering tell you about microelectromechanical sensor devices.

( And if you didn't understand micro-electro-mechanical, you really will be bored )

Now that my diaristic obligations have been fulfilled, I shall nap. Or try to nap. Or just lie in bed for half an hour. Yeah.

I was just reading some of the old posts in limyaael's journal, and I found one giving advice on writing. There were many good pointers in there, but the very first one struck me quite hard.

Avoid things that dull your brain. Yes, I've heard about writing from your soul or your heart, too. I'm not one of those writers, or at least not a writer who can tell clearly what writing comes from my "heart" and what from my "head." I tend to think the brain has a great deal to do with good writing in the purely physical sense, at least, given how drastically the smallest occurrence there can affect someone's mood.

I find that I don't feel much like writing after watching TV or playing video games. In fact, I find it much less easy to do anything that I normally find fun after those two. They exhaust me in an odd way, cloud my thoughts, or make me have to give up a whole lot of arguments with the plotline in order to enjoy whatever entertainment they can provide.

Thing is, I need my mind to write. I want to be able to know that a plot twist wouldn't make sense, that a character wouldn't say that, that I really shouldn't write that scene because it would contradict something I said two hundred pages earlier. So I avoid playing video games altogether, and watch TV only when I absolutely cannot get out of it or when (for those rare shows I enjoy on their own merits) I've finished my writing for the day.

Other people might get incredibly stimulated by television, though I don't actually know anyone like that. Other people may find that contact with other people tires them out, or that reading through Internet flamewars dulls their thoughts and makes them rabid. So avoid them. Ultimately, this comes down to self-discipline on your part. If those things have that kind of effect on your mind, you are the only one who will realize it, and the only one who can grab your own arm and frog-march you away from that thing before you hurt yourself.

I don't think this is just writing advice. I remember feeling lethargic after playing videogames for hours. I remember having a hard time concentrating on homework after surfing the web all day.

Avoid things that dull your brain. Hmm.