Notices by lime! (lime@hachyderm.io)

@inthehands @b0rk you actually just retriggered a memory for me.
sometime in my teens (early 2000s) one of the shows i'd watch on discovery, "how it's made", switched over from passive voice to using the "they" form and the programme just started feeling like it was talking down to the audience and to this day i can't explain why.
instead of saying "the dingle is carefully florped", it started using "they carefully florp the dingle" even when nobody was involved in a fully automatic process. it felt like a dumbing-down of the language, and to my ESL ears it started to grate.

now, i've read the reasoning behind avoiding passive voice in a scientific context and to a large part i agree that it should be avoided when the style requires clarity and detail. however, the difference in prosaic flow feels significant, at least to me, and to this day i'm hesitant to use active voice when describing processes that are meant to be transparent to users (in instruction manuals and such).

@inthehands @b0rk as a non-native speaker, when learning english we were told to always default to the passive voice in writing when not talking about people specifically. is this a recent change to the "language style guide"?

@gamingonlinux considering that the latest intellivision product was the Amico, does that mean Tommy Tallarico made the ET game?

@clacke @NanoRaptor @strwbrryJen You're right! i'm mixing my nomenclature, of course i meant the nordics :)

@strwbrryJen @NanoRaptor ammonium chloride. it tastes amazing. like half of scandinavian candy is full of it.

@inthehands @olsonexi @Wolven it comes in the can