Policies
The rules we hold ourselves to.
Five short documents. Each is dated, and each changes only with a note saying what moved.
About · dated 2026-09-26
Who publishes this
QuarterMaster is written and published by Dark Vector Cognition LLC, an independent studio in Austin, Texas, and edited by its founder. It began as a field manual from a father to a son and is published so the standard can be tested by anyone.
The site takes no advertising and no sponsored placements. Its editorial imagery is generated in-house and deliberately unbranded; real products appear only in named reviews, with real photography.
It may earn a commission on some links to where an object can be found (see Paid links below).
Changed 2026-09-26: added how the site earns.
Contact: hello@darkvectorcognition.ai.
Editorial policy · dated 2026-09-12
Answer first. Reason always. Date everything.
Every published position is complete on the day it publishes: the answer, the physical reason, and the compromise it accepts. Positions carry a date. When one changes, the old ruling stays visible and the new one names what moved.
Grades (S through D) score the object and the conduct around it against five tests, not the price. A modest object can set the standard in its lane; an expensive one can still fail the room.
Personal letters publish only when a real incident has been sourced. No invented scars, no borrowed nostalgia.
The Ask surface answers only from published QuarterMaster pages. When the site has no position, it says so rather than inventing one.
Privacy · dated 2026-09-27
Your Quarter stays on your device.
Your Quarter, the inventory of objects you already own, is stored in your browser only. It is echoed to a first-party recovery cookie on this domain for one year. No account, no server copy. Export and import are files you hold; the QR handoff moves data between your devices without touching ours.
Ask sends your question and a handful of matching passages from this site to a model endpoint to compose an answer. Questions are not stored with any identity, and the endpoint is limited to published QuarterMaster text.
The Quartermaster in ChatGPT, Claude and other assistants. The connector at quartermaster.style/api/mcp/ needs no account and reads only public QuarterMaster data. Your assistant sends it what a request needs: an occasion, a budget, how you want to come across, a maker, a category, a price. For each call we log the assistant app's name, version and user agent, the tool used, and those coarse details (occasion, impression, budget, category, where a piece is sold), to count use and improve the ledger. We never receive your conversation, your name or your account, and these logs carry no IP address. They sit in our host's (Vercel) runtime logs for no more than 30 days and are shared with no one else. To stop, remove the connector from your assistant. Your assistant's provider handles your conversation under its own policy.
Measurement. The site uses Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights: page views, referrers, device class, and a small set of named interactions (a room opened, a kit saved, a reservation clicked). This is aggregate and cookieless; it is not tied to a person or to what is in your Quarter. Each visit and each click to a retailer also records the state and city it came from, as our host reads it from the connection. We do not store IP addresses and set no cookie for it.
Reservations and email. Reserving the Field Manual opens an email to us. We keep that email to fulfil the reservation and for nothing else. We do not run a mailing list today; when we do, joining will be an explicit opt-in on this page.
Changed 2026-09-27: added the Quartermaster in ChatGPT, Claude and other assistants. Changed 2026-09-26: added state and city measurement.
Requests to see or delete anything we hold: hello@darkvectorcognition.ai.
Paid links · dated 2026-09-26
The recommendation is chosen first; the link comes after.
QuarterMaster may earn a commission if you buy through paid links on a page. Where that is the case, a plain disclosure appears above the first paid recommendation on that page. If the best object in a lane offers no commission, QuarterMaster still recommends it.
Object pages list where each object can be found. Today none of those links is paid. When a retailer's program approves QuarterMaster, its links are marked Paid link and this disclosure appears above the first one.
Every recommendation records the merchant, the commission status, and the date it was last checked. Commission never changes a grade, a ruling, or the order in which options are listed.
Changed 2026-09-26: object pages now carry links; none is paid yet.
Terms of use · dated 2026-09-27
Use it freely. It is judgment, not a guarantee.
QuarterMaster, its website and its connector for AI assistants are published by Dark Vector Cognition LLC. You may read, share and use them for your own shopping at no cost, and you need no account.
Grades, prices, plans and verdicts are our editorial judgment on the date shown. Prices and stock change, and a verdict is not a promise about any particular item: check the tag, the fit and the seller before you pay. QuarterMaster sells nothing and is not a party to anything you buy from a retailer.
The site and the connector are provided as they are, without warranties, and to the extent the law allows, Dark Vector Cognition LLC is not liable for purchases or losses that follow from using them. Do not use the connector to overload the service or to copy the ledger in bulk.
These terms are governed by the laws of Texas. Questions: hello@darkvectorcognition.ai.