#(Both Annes were direct contemporaries and I think they had a very similar style)

[metamodel]

Lamb of God Returns From Pet Sematary as Zombie Content

This email is powered by the trouble between metalworkers, AI, scratched CDs and the cloud. Doing strategic design, I’m always navigating tensions around narratives of change, often ostensibly involving “technology” or some desired or feared “disruption”. What do such narratives mean? Is change always good? Is there anything interesting in the detritus left behind? I’m always drawn to ambivalence.

So it’s no surprise that in the wake of Easter, my thoughts hover above the border between death and rebirth, collapse and resurgence, obsolescence and renewal. And as Passover season led into May Day, I was reminded that in order to find new life, we sometimes need to do more than just hustle like good neoliberal subjects, and actually mess up the one around us, like the plagues visited upon Egypt, or industrial action. 

I keep thinking of that awesome first-season finale of American Gods: wily old Odin tells Ostara, the ancient pagan goddess of Easter, that she’s sustained only by the meagre echo of Spring festivities that survive in our contemporary chocolate egg rituals. It’s time to demonstrate her true power to the New Gods, he says. So in the devastating penultimate scene, Ostara decides to withdraw Spring from the world, leaving the land withered and gnarled.

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Easter (the ever-delightful Kristin Chenoweth) withdraws her labour.[/caption]

Says Odin:

Tell the believers and the non-believers. Tell them we’ve taken the Spring. They can have it back when they pray for it.

Such chutzpah: it's the Earth, going on fucking strike against the World. So if a Norse god union organiser calls on you next Passover/Easter/May, on which monstrous powers will you draw? How will you Show Them Who You Really Are?

Happy May.

• • •

STATION IDENT: After returning to design after a year away, I find that Everything Now Looks Very Strange Indeed™. This is another one of my updates on restarting a creative practice, with added cultural and design commentary.

(If someone’s forwarded this thing to you in the hope you’ll find it interesting, you can subscribe here to secure my everlasting love. And please, pass it on if you think it might be of interest to anyone.)

🔂🌏 The eternal return of post-human-centred design

Giles Lane from Proboscis took some time to wrestle with my recent ambivalence about human-centred design. Recapping: back in Issue #2 I asked, “Isn’t putting humans at the centre of things what got us into this climate disaster?”, to which Giles replied:

I have a very different understanding of Human Centred Design based on needs rather than desires, including the need to co-exist within a healthy environment/ecosystem. It draws on its 1970s roots, based in radical response to exploitation of people & communities by privileged elites.

Those of us whose work has always embraced a dialogue about ethics, values and been infused by a genuine concern for human centred, participatory design will always be on the periphery of the mainstream.

The thing is, Giles and I don’t have a very different understanding of human-centred design — I completely understand where he’s coming from. When onboarding new designers at Digital Eskimo, I was always at pains to emphasise how the heritage we were inspired by — the Scandinavian participatory design tradition, amongst others — was a truly radical seam of practice that had been papered over by the rather less exciting idea that “listening to customers is common sense for business.” 🤮

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"From Fra Burmeister og Wain's Iron Foundry" by Peder Severin Krøyer, 1885.[/caption]

I would argue that contemporary design methods, whether they acknowledge it or not, owe a massive debt to organisations like the Norwegian Union of Iron and Metalworkers, who in the 1970s were disruptively intervening in debates about automation and computerisation. Rather than simply being “for” or “against” the machines that were threatening to replace them, workers became high-level designers of workplace technology systems. Now that debates about automation have again recurred in this age of AI, we would do well to pay attention to these traditions. 

But I’d still argue that in spite of the traditions Giles and I both still cherish, the balloon of “human-centredness” has nonetheless semantically burst, and was never completely tenable in the first place. An analogy: “Third World nationalism” presided over some heroic moments in the struggle against colonial domination, but I nonetheless think that nationalism was never exactly a good thing in the first place, and also tends to yield ever-decreasing returns as a corrective to very real global inequalities. 

I think we simply need new beacons for navigating our more-than-human design landscape. These landmarks might include the work of people like Anab Jain from Superflux (see this talk at the IxDA’s Interactions 18 for a good overview of her work), Anne Galloway from the More-Than-Human Lab and others. Let’s all watch that space, and please let me know if you find anything interesting — I’ll feature it here in a future issue.

🐕🤖 Old dogs, new

I was at the City of Sydney’s latest CityTalk, “Our Future With AI and Its Rise In China”: a keynote from Robert Hsiung, chief of the online tech education platform Udacity in China. I found the evening singularly unimpressive. Rather than indulge in wide-eyed liberal panic about Chinese authoritarianism by mining a seam of yellow peril rhetoric, the subsequent conversation went in the other direction entirely, studiously avoiding any discussion about machine learning’s use by the Chinese surveillance state. 

Hsiung emphasised the importance of “mastering the machine” to staying relevant as humans in an AI world, citing case studies in which “even��� blue collar Chinese workers with a mere secondary education were successfully retrained by Udacity as AI programmers. Sure, they want to democratise tech skills, and I agree that adaption is preferable to sticking one’s head in the sand, but when Hsiung characterises people on society’s periphery as “people who didn’t study enough in school” (actual words used), I’m not seeing Norwegian metalworkers taking power into their own hands. I can’t help but wonder there’s an implicit element of patronising, tut-tutting disciplinary action in this imperative to retrain before the Singularity overwhelms the uninitiated. 

Hsiung’s keynote ultimately devolved into a stiff, extended advertisement for Udacity, reminding me of nothing so much as a dystopian propaganda spot for a corporation like Omni Consumer Products in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. If this deeply uninteresting event is the best the city’s public sphere can do on the AI front, Lord Mayor Clover Moore ought to be embarrassed. 

💿☠️ Obsoletely nothing

I’m alive / I’m dead 

— The Cure, “Killing an Arab”

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Image by Rishi Deep at Unsplash[/caption]

When I realised not long ago that some of my primary school art students were habitually getting stuck in their creative endeavours, I got them to look for stimulus in unlikely places. “Look at what’s been thrown away at your feet,” I told the class. The next day, my own advice returned to me as a gift.

Local government rubbish cleanups are the rhythmic heavings of the suburbs. A few times a year, we find the unwanted and the outmoded disgorged onto the street (and more often than not, you can find me rummaging through the junk). As I got off the bus that afternoon, an object on the pavement suddenly came into focus as having joined the the ranks of the obsolete: a CD tower. A tall, narrow shelf, made solely to hold a large collection of compact discs. 

A few years before, it had been cathode ray tube TVs and VHS tapes on the nature strip. Today, a piece of furniture had lost its one purpose. Next to it, victims of the streaming moment, were endless shiny platters: redundant CDs and DVDs. I felt a pang of melancholy at this diorama of churn, but couldn't muster up any actual nostalgia for CDs. I suspect that I’m not alone in this. 

In 1998 I wrote a short science fiction story that touched on the possibility of being nostalgic for media formats that were then only just beginning to be challenged by new forms of media like the Internet. Mirroring what I was then seeing with the fetishisation of vinyl records, my 21st Century protagonist, Sebastian Tan, was a CD fetishist. While I gave Seb the ability to hack into streaming media services to get lasting access to the discrete music files themselves, this streaming pirate still preferred physical media. 

And the act of opening the digipak and sliding the antique CD in place was a ritual. Trainspotting. When he first found Silver Rocket, it was a revelation. It was a place. He’d just stood there, soaking it in – the lost garage punk compilations, the late ’90s Skint family, the Anokha artists. All the music physically in the same room. Old silver platters and everything. 

Since this was 20 years ago, I don’t remember how much I actually believed how likely “CD fetishism” would actually be in the 21st Century, but the idea certainly seems ridiculous to me now. Naked optical discs like the CD and the DVD seem to be missing the qualities that would guarantee their fetishisation. There’s something fragile, bare and unromantic about them. It strikes me that this is perfectly illustrated by two Kanye West album covers:

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On the left is his 2013 masterpiece Yeezus, which unfortunately affects the style of a blank CD. To the right is its recent sequel, the not-so-great Yahndi, which makes up for its mediocrity by aping a magnificent Sony MiniDisc, a fabulous storage format that was largely outmoded by the turn of the millennium. 

Don’t be fooled by the similarities, because these two things are chalk and cheese. MiniDiscs were cool. CDs are not. In addition to enclosing a rewritable magneto-optical disc inside a permanent case, giving them a more tactile quality, MiniDiscs were also smaller in the hand. And in the cinema of the mid- to late-’90s, they were a shorthand for “vaguely futuristic storage media”. 

MiniDiscs played a significant role as storage for VR contraband in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995). Ralph Fiennes furtively stashes old VR recordings of happier times with Juliette Lewis in a shoebox of MiniDiscs, but one particular disc that comes into his possession becomes the MacGuffin in the film’s thriller plot.

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Gotcha: VR proof of racist police brutality… captured on disc! (See how actually compact it is in the hand?) And in the Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999), MiniDiscs return as contraband, this time stashed heavy-handedly inside Neo’s copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra. By this time they’d become almost retro-futuristic, somehow at home with the acoustic coupler modems and Bakelite handsets.

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There’s something reassuringly tangible about the MiniDiscs in these movies. Their secret hiding places are enticing. And the sight of these contraband objects being exchanged for physical cash is just too delicious.

In short, I wish I could be nostalgic for CDs like I am for MiniDiscs (which, truth be told, I never used that much). It’s as if MiniDiscs occupy in my imagination a subjunctive road-not-taken that would have made disposable optical media less crass. I almost feel like mad old King Denethor in Lord of the Rings, wishing that it was his less favourite son who died in battle.

🧟‍♀️💾 Zombie content

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There are folders on my laptop that owe their structure purely to having originated on random old floppy disks that I found in the cupboard. Some of these files are unreadable, despite being Microsoft Word documents. Microsoft are amongst the most slavish followers of backwards-compatibility in the technology industry, even to the extent that they replicate the behaviour of ancient bugs in newer versions of Windows in order for apps to run smoother, but it seems that documents created in versions that predate Word 98 are lost to me. (I’ve learned my lesson: these days, everything’s in plain text Markdown.)

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I’m intrigued by the file titled “WHOREBOY.doc”. From what I recall, it contained notes for a graphic novel I was planning about an undead sex-worker-of-colour in the antebellum South. A black 19th Century superhero, Whoreboy kicked arse. At least, that’s what I remember. 

Update: turns out that plain text editors can glean most of the content from old binary Word files. My memory proved largely correct. Whoreboy was a runaway slave rent-boy who could sprout tentacles from his back and rise from the dead. In moments of crisis, the old slaver’s brand on his shoulder would glow, perversely triggering latent superpowers. (I’d flagged the branding of African American slaves for further research. These days I’d be in Wikipedia rabbit-hole instead.)

A snippet:

Whoreboy’s mentor, an old “witchdoctor”, mentions Jimbo in the Mirror, the terrifying folk spirit that you can only see at midnight. 

“Really?” asks Whoreboy. 

“No, I made it up,” he says. “Them white folk love that shit. Brown Eye for the White Guy, I call it.”

Okay, perhaps it needs more work. But think of the possibilities! 

What’s the funniest skeleton in your digital closet?

🎼🔁 Refrain, with key change

It’s apparent that I often think inordinately about the past while navigating change, even if it involves a kind of “meta-nostalgia” (as above: when nostalgia doesn't seem possible, I feel “nostalgic” about “feeling nostalgic”). As I’ve said earlier,

I often look to the past when I think about the very idea of the future, not just so we can avoid repeating “the mistakes of history” (as important as that might be), but because as designers trying to make the world a better place, we really should honour the creative friction that happens when the weird fragments of the past we continue to live with rub against the potentials of the present moment. (For a future-oriented person, I do an amusing amount of hoarding! In my view, forgetting to deal with legacy systems, even if “dealing with them” involves actively destroying them, is tantamount to vapourware dreaming.)

But I’m also realising that to hover in the futurepast in the way I do means more than just coming to grips with the past, with all its traumas and potentials. I suspect that my own retrofuturistic tendencies are an instinctive way to express the bind we find ourselves in as makers of newness (designers, strategists, “change-makers”) under late capitalism: so much of our work these days seems to involve making organisations more adaptable, resilient, nimble and innovative, but how this might also be a friendly form of neoliberal shock therapy? How much is the agility of the contemporary design-led organisation a way to produce subjects who compliantly flex with the ever-shifting sands of the market?

I love to tell people about my work facilitating cultures of design possibility in organisations. After a productive co-design session, a client team-member will express joy about the concepts they’re helping to flesh out. 

“You realise, don’t you,” I say, “that you’ve nominated yourself as a key part of the leadership for this project, right?” 

The resulting look of terror on their face — the one that says, “B-BUT THAT’S NOT IN MY 12-MONTH WORK PLAN!” — is one that I always relished. And so I drag them kicking and screaming into the future. While I’m not about to defend calcified organisational cultures of bureaucratic planning, I’m now a bit more equivocal; I can see some continuity between my own gleefulness and the forces that are casualising workforces around the planet. 

Perhaps my hovering, with my face turned to the past as I explore futurity (and like Lot’s wife as she looks back at Sodom even as she flees), is an admission that security and belonging are worth something in these times. So as we experience the churn of obsolescence and innovation, let’s keep our wits, sympathies and sense of revolt about us. 

A sustainable portion of all my love,

Ben

[stained-with-light]

Anne and God

PART D.  General Readership Essay (30)

Choose ONE of the texts studied this semester (it may be one that you wrote an essay or creative response on) and write a 500-750 word essay on one of the following: how a) this text challenges and perhaps corrects contemporary views; b) encourages and/or challenges you in your walk with Christ (Deepened your walk with Jesus? Challenged your faith? Helped you see an idol you love? Encouraged you? Blessed you?); or c) both “a” and “b”. Refer to details in the text and speak to how the author’s worldview might be helpful or even vital for us today and/or to yourself specifically. You may write this in a personal essay style, directed to general readership, such as in a well-written journal or blog article. (You may use the first person voice, “I,” but do so sparingly.)

When first introduced to the world of Avonlea and the red-headed heroine lived in the small spare room of the east gable, my nine-year-old self was enamoured. In these pages, I not only found a good story about a clever girl, I saw myself. Our personalities, adventures, and experiences were so similar and I took deep comfort in the representation that this book presented to me and immersed myself in it for many of my formative childhood years. But, as many things of childhood do, Anne of Green Gables began to live on the bookshelf more and more. What a pleasure it was, then, to be asked to return to it for this class. Upon this re-read, I was again enchanted with the chattering and imaginative girl who met me on these pages, laughing at her antics, as one laughs at dated childhood photos of themselves. I had expected, upon returning to this book, a nostalgic stroll into a beloved childhood story. I did not expect to again, just like my young nine-year-old self, see myself on these pages, now in the older Anne and feel so known. Anne's view of God and desire for and growth towards goodness encouraged me deeply in my spirituality throughout this re-read. I felt profoundly encouraged through reading about someone so like myself who viewed God so similarly.

Through the novel, Anne approaches all things, including God, through a lens of deep emotion. However, as she grows and is influenced and taught by those around her, Anne's emotion is not suppressed but harnessed and she begins to use her emotions as a gift, allowing them to be shaped by gentleness and self-control. From the beginning to the end of the novel we see tremendous growth in this area for Anne. No longer does she let her mistakes and trials pull her down to “the depths of despair” as it did in her childhood. As an adult, I too sometimes struggle with how to reconcile my deep, sometimes tumultuous, experience of emotions with God. Being able to see Anne, a character very similar to me, navigate this, and learn to pursue goodness in her own way was extremely encouraging to me in my own faith journey. Instead of allowing my deep emotions to rule me, I am encouraged, by this book, to allow myself to come into a greater sense of self-control and gentleness.

Anne's vast imagination also deeply affects how she sees all things, including God. Not only does it allow Anne to understand the humanity and divinity of Christ (ex. when she speaks about Jesus and the children painting in Marilla's hallway), but it also allows her to see God and religion with deep wonder and creativity. When Marilla attempts to teach Anne to pray, Anne professes that she believes it would be much better to go out into the beauty of creation and “feel a prayer”. Marilla, not understanding this, makes Anne learn a prayer the next day. However, Anne's whimsical and creative approach to spirituality continues and is not dampened throughout the novel. The creativity and wonder Anne approaches God with profoundly speaks to me. Sometimes, in relation to Christianity, I feel like an Anne in a world of Marilla's. I too approach God with this same creativity and wonder and am often harshly reminded that many people in the church think this is wrong. Not only is it a comfort to see my experience represented in the pages of this novel but, through reading, I was also encouraged that my powerful creativity need not be thrown away in the pursuit of God and goodness but is deeply valued by Him.

In re-reading this book I was reminded of who I was, who I am, and who I am made to be. I realized that I haven't strayed far from the little girl I used to be or from the redheaded girl of Avonlea. She and I haven't grown apart, we have simply grown up and she still has lessons to teach me. Encouraged in my faith from the lessons in this book, I hope this will no longer be a story that remains dusty on my bookshelf but that will continue to be re-read and loved throughout my life.

[harryandmeghan0-blog]

The Duchess Dazzles in Fijian Blue Gown for State Dinner!

New Post has been published on https://harryandmeghan.xyz/the-duchess-dazzles-in-fijian-blue-gown-for-state-dinner/

The Duchess Dazzles in Fijian Blue Gown for State Dinner!

The Duchess of Sussex dazzled in Fijian blue for a reception and State Dinner at the Grand Pacific Hotel.

The Duke and Duchess make their entrance.

The black-tie dinner was hosted by the President of Fiji, Jioji Konrote. Harry and Meghan visited him and his wife at his official residence Borron Park earlier today.

During a speech, the President referenced the late Princess Diana saying she would she would be “proud” of the man Harry’s become and the happiness he has found with Meghan.

The appearance follows a busy arrival in Fiji where Harry and Meghan received an incredibly warm welcome in Suva. Thousands lined the streets and gathered outside the hotel to catch a glimpse of them. The pair were all smiles as they arrived, they both appear to be enjoying this tour immensely. A Palace aide told royal reporter Russell Myers: “Their Royal Highnesses are absolutely relishing the tour and enjoying every moment. They have both said how much they are loving it and have been overwhelmed by the warmth of the welcome and the people.”

The Duke and Duchess met guests and officials.

A look at an invitation for the dinner.

The couple’s deputy private secretary Amy Pickerell is pictured wearing black. She’s been by Meghan’s side throughout the tour.

During a speech Harry said: “It is a great pleasure for Meghan and me to be your guests here tonight on our first visit to Fiji. We were overwhelmed by the warm Fijian welcome we received from the people of these beautiful islands.”

More from Harry’s speech:

‘We share Commonwealth values and common goals – a love of rugby and a sense of humour! Our ties run deep. Your soldiers fought with the British Armed Forces during the first and second world wars, and continue to serve alongside our soldiers to this day, with more than 1,250 Fijians currently serving. ‘I must emphasise my respect, admiration and camaraderie with the Fijian soldiers that I served with in Afghanistan. We trained together, we fought together and, most importantly, we laughed together.’

This visit is particularly nostalgic for us as a young married couple – my grandparents stayed in this very hotel, the Grand Pacific, a number of times over the years. But this visit is also an opportunity to learn more about the future of Fiji, your economic growth, sustainable tourism development and social enterprises. We are really looking forward to meeting the students at the University of the South Pacific and the young leaders from all walks of life. The health and sustainability of this planet depends on the younger generation and they are full of optimism, so let’s listen to them.’

The Grand Pacific Hotel has been a part of the South Pacific for over a century. Once established as the standard of luxury that was fit for royalty; now more than 100 years later, the Grand Pacific Hotel remains true to the ideals of delivering the best of old world charms, South Pacific hospitality and contemporary service.

Rebecca English shared the stats on past royal visits to Fiji:

‘Harry and Meghan will be staying at the Grand Pacific Hotel, where the Queen also stayed in 1953. Since then Fiji has hosted 5 visits from the Queen in 1963, 1970, 1973, 1977 & 1982; three from Charles in 1970, 1985 and 2005; one from Andrew in 1998 and another from Anne in 2006.’

Tonight marked Meghan’s first evening gown appearance since her wedding day and she certainly didn’t disappoint.

The Duchess looked stunning in the Safiyaa Ginkgo Cape Dress. The £1,095 gown is described as: “Full-length fitted short sleeve cape dress with a long tailed back with a deep split and covered buttons, all in bluette stretch heavy crepe.”

The ‘Fijian blue’ hue added a very nice touch of sartorial diplomacy.

London based brand Safiyaa was launched by creative director Daniela Karnuts in 2011. With a demanding career in fashion media, she needed a wardrobe that was sophisticated and polished, without being boring or dated. Searching for pieces that were flattering, combinable and travelled well led her to question why a man could go to London’s Savile Row for bespoke suiting yet a woman had to settle on fixed styles and colours. With a selection of 12 dresses and endless ambition, Daniela began her journey to fulfill her needs and those of women with similar desires as well. Named after her daughter, Safiyaa was started from there. The brand is described as “created for women by women”.

As for Meghan’s dazzling earrings, Emily Andrews reports: “The mystery of Meghan’s earrings… all KP will say is that they’re “borrowed”. From whom, they will not say. Most likely the Queen.”

Meghan also wore a shimmering bracelet.

The Telegraph reviewed the look:

‘The black-tie dress code in Fiji called for a dressier look, and Meghan’s floor-length dress by London label SAFiYAA delivered in spades. The simple lines of the dress and bold shade of blue made for a slick, modern style statement.  Then – lest we think Meghan’s look oversimplified – she added a pair of drop earrings featuring gobstopper-sized diamonds. 

The colour seems to be another of Meghan’s go-tos: she is often seen in shades of blue, and this particular dress was a near-perfect colour match for the Jason Wu dress that the Duchess wore to a gala concert for military veterans in September. But there could be more to the colour choice than that. The shade of blue is also very similar to that of the Fijian flag, which is symbolic of the surrounding Pacific ocean. Meghan hasn’t always trodden the diplomatic-style line – her French wedding dress a case in point – but perhaps Tuesday’s choice was a step in that direction.’

To view our post on Harry and Meghan’s departure from Fraser Island click here. Our post on the couple’s Fiji arrival and official welcome is here. The Duchess wore a dress by Australian brand Zimmermann and jewels with special royal connections.

Tomorrow’s schedule, Wednesday 24 October:

Harry will lay a wreath at the Fiji War Memorial, and meet a number of Fijian war veterans, some of whom served with the British Armed Forces. Links between the British Military and Fiji continue to this day with more than 1250 Fijians currently serving in the British Army.

Their Royal Highnesses will then visit the University of the South Pacific campus in Suva, where they will observe a cultural performance on the effects of climate change, before meeting students studying subjects from agriculture to women’s development. The event will be streamed to a number of the university’s campuses throughout the Pacific region. The Duke will make a short speech in his capacity as Commonwealth Youth Ambassador, and The Duchess will say a few words.

From here, Harry and Meghan’s programme will split – The Duke will travel to Colo-i-Suva Forest Park, and The Duchess to the British High Commissioner’s Residence. Colo-i-Suva is an indigenous forest site housing many flora and fauna native to Fiji, and species including the Fiji Tree Frog. It is also Fiji’s dedication to The Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy. Before unveiling a plaque to mark its dedication and planting an endangered native tree, His Royal Highness will meet with school children, student conservators, representatives from sustainable tourism industries, and local landowners and villagers to see how the rainforest impacts upon their education and livelihoods.

Meanwhile, The Duchess will attend a morning tea at the British High Commissioner’s Residence to showcase women’s organisations which operate throughout Fiji. In particular, Her Royal Highness will hear more about a UN Women’s project, ‘Markets for Change’, which promotes women’s empowerment in marketplaces throughout the Pacific.

The Duchess will then travel to Suva Market to meet some of the female vendors who have become empowered through the project.

What do you think of Meghan’s first royal gown appearance? 🙂

**This post will be updated shortly**

Source: http://madaboutmeghan.blogspot.com/2018/10/first-look-duchess-dazzles-for-fiji.html