Hi everyone!

@Viridian and I have been thinking about our announcement blog, and we've decided on some changes to the way we'd like to make announcements.

In the past, we've always put a lot of effort into wording our announcements in just the right way to both interest as many people as possible, as well as create a narrative of hype and excitement. We've always felt our members were a bit apathetic and constantly being on the receiving end of abuse or criticism from people who misunderstood announcements, we would put in hours and hours into writing announcements, going back and forth with multiple drafts, making sure the wording couldn't be misconstrued or used against us.

Ultimately, this took a lot of our time and meant that announcements would take days or weeks to finish, since we wouldn't always have the time, or the right mindset, to constantly correct ourselves over minute details of how a sentence is constructed. As a result, not only were those announcements late, but these days, I also always dread "oh no, we'll have to make an announcement about Pink Day", and I usually write announcements way later than I wanted to, just because it's something that feels like such a big task.

And we just don't want to do that anymore.

We feel that we should be able to put out our thoughts and announcements easily without having to spend hours thinking "How will people turn this around to make us look like bad guys?" We want to feel comfortable in just writing and posting announcements, and speak and be treated like human beings, rather than the staff of a faceless organisation.

This will also be better for the community, since we'll hopefully be able to put out more (but much shorter) announcements, more thoughts, share more about what's going on and our thoughts about things, as we don't have to spend hours and hours formalizing them, meaning everyone will be in the loop a lot more. We can post about works in progress more easily, as well as detail small changes as they happen, rather than wait for big announcements.

As a side effect, you'll also be seeing a lot more 1st person singular rather than plural  Our philosophy about that in the past was guided by the fact that using "we" instead of "I" and "us" instead of "you", as with commanding, is more inclusive and makes it less likely that people will feel excluded, and puts the focus on the group, rather than the individual speaking. However, in some contexts, this had the effect of alienating people since the language used feels more corporate.

Future announcements and blog posts will thus be shorter, less rigidly structured, more informal, and hopefully more frequent.