Interesting day yesterday... spent the afternoon at fellow sci-fi member Heidi's house participating in (well, actually, more like observing everyone else participating in) her ingenious Turnip Art Prize competition. Glue, cornflakes, pipe cleaners, glitter, play-dough and bird seed flew around in copious quantities in the name of artistic expression. I don't know which 'work of art' won because I didn't stay until the end, but my personal favourite was Heidi's The Pentatonic Scale of Cheese.

Had tons of fun, but when the discussion turned to weblogs, most of the people there - who I didn't really know at all - seemed fairly hostile to them, unless they were run by cool celebrities like Neil Gaiman. I told them: "I'm not denying that there are many poor weblogs and journals out there that exist to be little more than online diaries and are of absolutely no interest to the majority of the Internet population. But just off the top of my head I can name two dozen weblogs that are legitimately educational, emotive, funny, interesting or insightful, and you'd agree with me if you'd seen them, and nearly every one of them is run by a person with a perfectly ordinary life. The quality that defines a good weblog is not how famous the author is, but how well the author can think and write, and dismissing weblogs as a legitimate means of public expression because some of them are tedious is like dismissing all newspapers because one of them is the Daily Mail."

Actually, I didn't say any of that, because I'm not a character in an Aaron Sorkin television show. But that's what I should have said, instead of mumbling a half-baked defence that convinced absolutely nobody in the room. Curses.

Anyway, on to the cool links.

• It's very cool that Tachyon TV, the funniest and smartest source of popular sci-fi satire on the Web, now has its own accompanying weblog.
• Speaking of which, take a look at Stormcaller's new blog. Stormcaller is someone I met online through the Farscape campaign, who happens somehow to share just about all of my interests. So if the stuff I write about interests you, his site probably will too.
• The latest Return of the King character was announced on Tuesday and is already generating a considerable backlash against Peter Jackson and New Line.
• Finally, IGN published a long list of 'things you might have missed in The Two Towers'.