Hi again 👋 Welcome back to Unstructured Data. This week is about words I can barely say out loud, but it's more fun if you try.

To set the stage a bit, I was born in '99, which makes me a zillennial. (I'm 90% sure I'm mispronouncing that.) I'm that weird hybrid kid who grew up with millennials but was too young to be one, and too old to be Gen Z.

Do you remember your classrooms in elementary school? The big rug on the floor that had a clock or the alphabet on it, where you had to sit on your letter? Or playing hopscotch indoors because it was too cold to go outside? Those little pie-faced guys who were in every classroom, on every wall, marking birthdays and who was good or bad? (Who was good?)

Then somewhere along the way we got big and decided color was the enemy.

Someone asked me recently to describe my vibe, and my honest answer was a little all over the place: lifelong learner, a touch of millennial beige… but also Happy Bunny and Bobby Jack. And if I'm really being honest? Apple White from Ever After High. Apple was supposed to be the good one, but she wasn't really. She was just confused, trying to live up to a story someone else wrote for her. (I could watch the Ever After High and Monster High movies forever.)

The beige takeover

It's not just the color. A lot of millennials were raised by boomers, or by Gen Xers like I was, depending on how life shook out. And they were raised by parents or grandparents who lived through the Great Depression, who taught them to hold on to everything and stretch it as far as it could go. So our parents grew up with more is more is more, and we swung all the way to less is less is less. We decided minimalism is beautiful, and sometimes it is. Sometimes it's not. Now we spray-paint our children's toys beige and white, and everything has to match.

Even things like the robot dog give me pause, because it doesn't look like a dog. It's not like Goddard from Jimmy Neutron. It's four chicken legs with a rectangle in the middle for a body, and it makes dog sounds. It's like somebody LaCroix'd a dog.

And it's not just out there. Recently I've been in this weird neutrals phase: browns, creams, white and black, mostly. Almost my entire closet is this weird neutral hue. Which is fine, they go with everything. But if all I have is neutrals, there's nothing exciting.

My confession

Here's the uncomfortable part: I noticed the same thing when I started building.

I love hydrangeas. They're big and luscious, and they can bloom blue or pink depending on how you treat the soil. So when I wanted a brand, I decided: let's use the flower I love so desperately. And then it became this grossly clean thing that's nice for a recruiter, but isn't me.

I found myself building a brand and a website on this concept of needing to be clean and crisp and modern. And then I thought: that's not me.

Yes, I like the clean, crisp, elegant, romantic look. I always have. I always wanted to be Princess Mia, swept away by the Queen of Genovia: a ball, dancing the night away, and the whole foot-popping kiss at the end in the beautiful fountain. But I'm also a lover of Homer and the epics and the Aeneid. I want to live in the London Institute in the late 1870s, when Will and Tessa and Jem were fighting automatons in poofy skirts (minus the racism).

I want the loud arsenic green that probably would have killed me. I want Radium Girls levels of color, without dying for it.

I want the riot. The explosion. The websites I had when I was a kid that made your brain want to do stuff, like Cool Math Games, or Dance Mat Typing, the BBC game that taught you how to type.

Those sites were just complete things. They were fun, but they made you learn. With Dance Mat, you wanted to compete to get to the octopus, while half the class was still stuck on the billy goat. Cool Math had a lot of games, not just the learning ones, and it was always in dark mode, before dark mode was cool.

And whimsy. Remember when everyone picked a fairy in Pixie Hollow? You knew you wanted to be a Tinker Fairy because they could build, or a water fairy because they seemed so pretty and majestic. That kind of energy. That desire to live in Pixie Hollow because it was colorful, and the fairies were the ones who brought the seasons.

But low-stim isn't beige

Here's the balance, because I'm not saying everything should scream at you.

The dream is to build low-stim things for people who can't handle the riot, and I understand that. We can still have color that doesn't give us a heart attack. Color isn't the enemy.

I think we all just got so irritated with the mismatched colors, the random pillows and throws we all hated. My grandma had five different pillows that didn't match the set she had, and random blankets everywhere. Which are nice! You don't show those to people, but they're still your cozy, comfy blankets. Whereas now your house is just white and cream and ivory, and you wonder why kids draw on the sofa. (It's because it's white.)

We think clean means white and beige and cream. But clean can be colorful. Look at the '50s and '60s houses with the sunken floors: mid-century modern was absolutely gorgeous. Or look at the original Charmed, which I grew up on. The sisters lived in the manor their grandmother had made her own, and as they grew up, they changed the house to suit them. Piper was black leather jackets and basics. Phoebe was loud and romantic. Paige, who came along later, was all boho chic. Three sisters, three styles, one kooky house, and it never once looked beige. If we're going to live in our parents' kooky, disorganized homes, that's the vibe we should hearken back to. Character is what made us happy. It makes us think. It makes us feel human and connected.

I've been in environments where accessibility is very important. Currently, I live in a home where we are all some flavor of neurospicy; we all know it, and we just build our systems and schedules around it. We tried to do what the other houses in our community do, which is meet every two weeks. But with all of us being students, split in a million directions and having issues with focus, that just didn't work. So we picked Sundays for a monthly meeting instead. Once a month we meet, talk about our roles and anything that's lingering, and pound out our issues. We keep the conversations pretty simple, and we record the meeting so everyone has notes they can read and add to later.

Meeting people where they are, and where they know they lack, is far easier in a system than trying to force everybody. We try our best to give each other as much connection as we need, while also respecting that activity is not connection. For some people (myself included), activity can be really overwhelming. So we give ourselves that little break: hey, this is happening four weeks from now. You can mentally prepare.

That's what I want from design, too: a system that meets people where they are, instead of forcing everyone into the same room.

That's what Peony Plot, my future writing-tools site, is all about: being low-stimulus, without being lifeless.

I already build both

I already ship quiet versions. The Prompt Genie Jar and the time machine on samira-ray.dev both switch to a calm, no-motion version when someone's device asks for reduced motion.

And my portfolio? It now opens on the loud '90s desktop by default. The clean, modern side is the one you have to time-travel to.

So I made the riot the default.

And honestly, the more I do this Human Factor series and the more I say my thoughts out loud, the more I find things I really want to work on. More than just my portfolio. Things I've become so passionate about that I didn't realize I was, until I started posting on DEV.

With this transition in my life (finishing school, starting my master's eventually, exploring possibilities and expanding my goals, trying to build this vision for myself), I finally feel like I'm in a space to do it. That's been pretty freeing. In my quest to create whimsy in the world, I'm already on that journey, already taking the steps to build a world full of whimsy and joy and excitement.

My petition

I'm just asking that we take a moment to feel free and be whimsical. To feel excited, to feel that joy. Not necessarily to be kids again, but to feel the wonder and excitement of the world that being a kid was.

When I think back to being a kid, I think about my elementary school classroom with the rainbow floor, racing to sit on my letter. I think about the first time I realized what year it was. (It was May 5th, 2006.) The world looked so different. And now that I'm an adult, it's lost that brightness, that enthusiasm. Now that we're the new adults, yes, we're silly and goofy and we have fun, but it's not the same kind of fun. It's not discovering-how-to-spell-your-name kind of fun, when you learn how to do something for the very first time.

I hope that in this ridiculously long post and this extreme riot of begging for color to come back, you remember your childhood. Remember the brightness, the glitter, the sparkles, the Lizzie McGuire, the Monster High, the Ever After High. (Those are some Halloween ideas, if anyone's dressing up last minute.) Break out your High School Musical collection (which is somehow over 20 years old now, and I refuse to talk about it). Rewatch the Colosseum scene from The Lizzie McGuire Movie. Sing along to "Miracles Happen," or belt out "What Makes You Different (Makes You Beautiful)," because obviously, Princess Diaries. Just remember how good we had it, and don't take it away from everyone else.

So tell me: what's the loudest, most whimsical thing from your childhood you'd bring back? 👇

P.S. If anyone can give me a phonetic pronunciation of "zillennial," much appreciated.

See you next Friday, with a new word.

Kenspeckle (Scottish): conspicuous; easy to recognize; impossible to miss.

A note on how I wrote this one: I talked it out in voice notes, and AI helped me stitch them together and fix my typos. The opinions are all mine.

Want the technical side? My build write-ups live at blog.samira-ray.dev.