Past its Prime(val)

It's always strange when an established TV show makes changes to its format, but Primeval has just taken the biscuit. The first series bored me to tears within the first few episodes of the first series - trite dialogue, unconvincing pretty clotheshorse cast, generally poor execution of a reasonably interesting idea - and series two probably won't improve on it, thanks to a complete change in format 'explained' by use of the anomalies that pepper the series: Something happened in the past to rewrite history. The upshot is that the university professor protagonist is now the head field operative of an organisation created to take on the dinosaurs and return them from whence they came. Oh, and a character from the original series doesn't exist, and the protagonist is the only one who remembers her.

Essentially, series two looks to be 'Dino Crisis: The Series'. Capcom would be proud... but I suspect even their dialogue would have been better.

Yes, the team will now be running around, guns (tranquilisers, natch) blazing, taking on the dino-du-jour, and saving lots of screaming people from being eaten.

Good grief.

The end of the week was most peculiar. My senior designer will be off work next week (this is a good thing) because he's still very ill and he has lots of personal things to attend to with regards to his ailing mother (these are bad things). I kind of sympathise with him, but it's hard because he's so pathetic. He acts like the alpha male, commanding the floor with his raucous 'humour' and lapping up the attention of all the silly little girls in the office... but he's a 40-something loser who breaks down in tears at the first sign of trouble. He complains about being overworked, but takes on all kinds of stupid crap he shouldn't bother with because one of his harem of silly little girls asks him, and then he complains even more when he doesn't have time to do what he's supposed to because he's wasted time on whatever crap they give him. Then they complain that he hasn't done something he was supposed to, and he complains that he's being asked to do things he shouldn't have to.

I'd swear he's not self-aware sometimes.

Due to stress, illness and whatever other excuses, he was rather late in finishing our magazine on Friday... Everything else was done, and I was waiting on him for about 12-15 pages at the end of the day - this, despite him telling me at about 4.30 that he only had "about 10 minutes" work to do, and it'd all be done.

Still, in many ways he's not as bad as the senior designer on my counterpart's team, who has essentially escaped disciplinaries over his timekeeping because one of his editors has pissed off the MD. The politics in that place are insane. To make matters worse, his hours have been adjusted from 9-5.30 to 9.30-6... and on his first day on those hours, he still managed to arrive ten minutes late.

During the week, I had a couple of bites at my CV, now that it's up on some internet jobhunting sites. Some have been hopeless (one agency in particular can't tell the difference between a 'production manager' and a 'product manager' and asks in its emails that the recipient forward them to anyone they thinks suitable for the jobs on offer. How pathetic?

The other seemed promising, but I've yet to hear back from them, either by phone or email... They are becoming less promising by the day.

I've also received my most recent Amazon order - my first order of books in absolutely ages - including a collection of Maurice Leblanc's short stories of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Thief. I'd quite like to start reading it immediately, but I'm already dividing my time between The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and Mordant's Need, both by Stephen Donaldson.

Earlier today, I reorganised my display cabinets to give the TransFormers movie toys some breathing space. Galaxy Force has been reshuffled across only three shelves (which will need tidying), RiD has been moved over to the shelf that freed, and the movie toys have been split into an Autobots shelf and a Decepticons shelf. What I need now are 'Protect' and 'Destroy' posters to stick in the background...

Today's other achievement is that I finally managed to transform my TF:Universe Nemesis Prime into his beast mode. The instructions were utterly useless, so I ended up doing it by intuition having examined as many photos of the model I could find. It is a hopelessly overcomplicated model, made more so by the fact that it cannot properly transform with the missiles in their launchers (this is not true of other Beast Wars models). Even so, once everything is in place, Nemesis Prime makes a pretty good-looking black woolly mammoth.