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Augean Stables started as my (King Kashue) brain child. I had written for two other sites, PlanetDeusEx, where much of the staff first met, and the now defunct Force Monkeys. And while I loved writing for those sites, I had other things that I wanted to write about and address and didn't really have an arena in which to do so...enter Augean Stables...
Originally the idea of this site was a personal site (read "overgrown blog") in which I could editorialize (read: rant), review (read: rant), and comment on the world news of the day (read: rant). As I started to develop the idea, I turned to some of the folks that I had met at PDX and in doing so realized I had a pretty big source of talent available to me...talent that would work for free...In the time after that, the idea grew as we added staff and their abilities let us do more than previously thought, and eventually we ended up with the current site.
Augean Stables was born to be a time-wasting site, and that remains the driving vison for the site...A place where you think "I'll see what's happening at AS" and an hour later get in trouble with your boss for wasting company time. To indulge in my only bit of Corporate jingoism, "At Augean Stables we want to challenge your mind as we waste your time"...An eclectic and intelligent source of content is what we're going for here, and I hope we've achieved it.
The site is comprised of four major parts, the News dialogue, where we bring you just a few of the most important (or inane) news stories of the day. Don't think of it as a "news report" (as it is the diligent men and women of the news agencies who are doing the acutal reporting) but more of a "news filter", trying to show you what we think is interesting or important. The Reviews, where we try to keep up on the popular media of the day, and give you our glowing and insightful opinions (with great modesty I might add). The Features, reccurring content, often humourous; creative production from the dark recesses of our diseased minds. And the Editorials, the most serious section of the site, addressing important issues from as many different viewpoints as we can manage.
A few specific commitments from the AS staff:
- This is a "family friendly" site, at least in language...You're never going to see an F-bomb here and rarely will we ever indulge in vulgarity in general...
- We will address topics with the seriousness they merit, we'll touch on controversial topics, but we're going to deal with them appropriately...
- Every effort will be made to read and respond to polite emails (flames will get discarded immediately)... Even among the staff we have vastly different views, and we want to hear yours, especially in response to our editorials...If we start getting big, the personal attention to individual emails might trail off, but that's only because we're human...
A final note, if anyone is wondering where the title of the site comes from, and exactly what it has to do with the tag-line and the purpose of the site, I will give you two clues: 1. It has to do with the myth of Hercules (Heracles in the Greek), and 2. Augean, is an adjective which means "having to do with/belonging to Augeas...the rest is up to you to discover...
Right, so there's the mission statement I said I'd avoid...we're always happy to hear what you think about the site, so Let us know. Thanks.
-King Kashue-