Stabbing Westward

The Essential

first of all, a short summary of the band's history:
Stabbing Westward were a '90s industrial/alternative rock band. their only constant band members were their founders Mark Hall and Walter Flakus, who played under the SW pseudonym since 1985. officially the band was formed in 1992, with their first album following in 1993. their breakthrough was after their second album in 1996, but their success wouldn't last for too long. the following album was going to sell poorly, thus their label dropped the band. after finding another label they produced their last album, and broke up in 2002.

introducing: the sweet melancholy - Seal of Approval

i hereby announce a new segment i am willing to do on a regular basis (about once a month?) which i call sweet melancholy - Seal of Approval, or in short sm-SoA, in which i review, recap, inform, talk about or do a retrospective about ANYthing that in my opinion deserves the seal!
this can by literally everything, from a band or song, a movie, book or comic, over an artist, a piece of art, poem, scientific topic or philosophic opinion, to video games, my toe nails or the tv series i am recently watching - and so on!

so basically it will always be something that i want to introduce to you, the reader.
as you may have guessed it has to be of a certain... em... "kind" of media. you know, the romantically depressive type. the beautiful melancholy. the warm gloom. kinda like that, you get the point.
when i review something which deserves the seal, i will label it with [sm-SoA] and an image of the seal, so you will know why i wrote this article, which you are about to read.

i hope you like that idea.
i will start with a recapitulation about the band "Stabbing Westward", which i will release by tomorrow (plus/minus one day).

signing out.

new version, new address!

DoctrineDesigns.com

yet the biggest update to the Doctrine Designs homepage, because i changed a LOT!
i hope you don't remember the old one, because it was packed up with dozens of unneccessary functions. i got a lot of complains, and all were totally justified. so i purged it to its bones and got rid of everything that was annoying.
i'll cut the chatter and just list the most major changes:

- new address. it's now DoctrineDesings.com! the .de-addres will still be available, but re-direct to the .com-address instead.
- no multilingual interface. english is all we need, everybody can read it. even germans. so from now on the site will not be available in german anymore.
- no more skins. the prior system was extremely flashy and annoying. having styles to choose from isn't that special anymore, but different skins has just been too much. no one had an advantage of it, too many people haven't understood this concept at all and it was confusing as hell. the site is still available in different styles, but they share the same layout now and the user is not forced to choose. it's more or less hidden in the "other" section, only represented by a couple of colored dots.
- more connection to devianART. i got rid of the old gallery and the old portfolio. basically because i did not want to host so many different instances of my works, if i could simply join them as an alternative. i already maintain my dA gallery and portfolio anyways. in the future i want to use the RSS feed output to create an even better (automated) gallery, because now it's with iframes, what is kinda strange, i admit. but it works well so far.
- improved graphics. at least with the main styles, Doctrine + and Doctrine - (like it?)
- less menu entries. i merged the information sections, and i merged contact and hire. the news section got completely killed.
- new stock. version 2.0 is even lighter and easier to use. right now it has this cool function of scaling with the screensize (up to a maxed value). though it has still lots of glitches in the IE, which i hope to be able to fix in the near future... so far, please just don't use the IE...
- new organized front page. more information, but more compact and better arranged. does now feature the latest deviations and the latest dA journal entries.

i am open to further enhancements based on your opinions and wishes! give me your critique, good, bad or neutral!
i am also open for linking requests. i will link to every other homepage, which i like. just ask me (and if you like, give me your banner)!

please take at least a hasty look at it, and feel free to browse. have fun! ^^

vs.

(WARNING: this article contains spoilers for both series. do not read unless you saw both!)

since i first saw Lexx like more than 10 years ago i instantly fall in love with it, mainly because of its uniqueness. it needed me some time to get my hands on the third and fourth season, so i could only watch the series in its completness in autumn of last year.
with Red Dwarf i kinda am a late bloomer. it needed me Noah Antwiler briefly recommending the DVD collection to get my attention to it. he only needed to say "sitcom" and "sci-fi" in one sentence and that totally got me. as with Lexx it was the uniqueness of the concept that i could fall in love with, too. i just knew it was going to be great.

so i finally watched Red Dwarf during the past couple of weeks. and it needed me not a long time to recognize quite a few links to my favorite sci-fi series so far. strangely enough, because Red Dwarf came out much earlier than Lexx. and since Lexx did never seem to copy any other sci-fi instance, this new experience had a strange impact to me.
so i watched Red Dwarf, constantly with my attention on the comparison to Lexx. afterwards i have to admit that it mainly could be a lots of accidental occasions that leaded to similarities between the two series, caused by the alike uniqueness of both of them. it's like the concept of both had no choice as to resemble each other, because they share the same unique basis. but let's right dig into direct comparisons of things i noticed and see what comes out of it...