A Few Promises, To Begin
1000 Gears was created somewhere between my need for a new website and (my softer, fuzzier, and more-optimistic alter-ego) Catboy’s response to the other community/archive sites out there.
We invite all of you to join in. Submit something if you’d like – fiction or commentary, pictures or words – and we’ll see if we can find a place for it. There’s something really magical about the energy that a small group of talented, creative people can find, given the freedom to riff off one another and the world around them.
That energy is really what we’re trying to encourage with 1000 Gears, so we’re going to make a few promises to you right now.
- No ads. No advertisers. Ever.
- No filler.
- If it’s not good, we won’t post it.
- Anonymous submissions are anonymous. Period.
- Once it’s up, it’s up.
If we like something and want you to know, we’ll review it. If we don’t, and we want you to know, we’ll review that too.
We will not post unless we have things to say. 1000 Gears should be interesting even if you have no idea who we actually are.
We may not post it even if it is good, depending on our space and bandwidth concerns, but we won’t post it unless we feel that it’s worth reading.
We may link to Terrible Badness™ if we can find creative ways to mock it, but only if we believe the mockery is worth posting on its own.
I tried to make him be nicer, really I did. This was the best I could do. - Catboy
If you don’t want to be credited, we’ll delete your personal information once we post your work. Anonymity grants you the freedom to speak freely, and even we won’t know who you were.
Of course, should the situation arise, we’ll cooperate fully with courts and/or the appropriate legal notices. Beyond that, though, we’ll stand behind our decisions to post. We believe that artistic merit trumps obscenity, and we believe in the freedom to rip and remix ideas from from the world around us. If Neo-Confederate sympathizers want to complain, they’re more than welcome to submit rebuttals – we’d love to give them equal time if they have interesting things to say – but we certainly won’t delete it without warning.
All of this boils down to two basic points:
- We will be worth reading.
- We won’t sell out.
It’s really that simple.