Joe Buckingham

I don’t know if you’ve seen the Poppy Appeal adverts for 2009. They show a variety of wounded/dead soldiers, as you’d expect, with the tagline “For their sake, wear a poppy.”

But the difference this year, is that the soldiers they show are all modern ones, from recent wars such as Afghanistan. This is what bugs me.

As far as I (an out-and-out pacifist) am concerned, the last worthwhile war (if that’s not an oxymoron) that the UK has been involved in was WWII; we were fighting to directly protect our allies against unreasonably inhumane suffering.

So these latest adverts made me seriously think twice about buying a poppy this year. I do not buy a poppy to support the men and women who signed up of their own free will to fight in what I believe was an unnecessary and immoral war. In fact, in my eyes, these people are no better than criminals.

I will still be wearing a poppy this year, however it will be in memory of the soldiers who fought in the World Wars so that we could live in peace and happiness, not the mindless thugs who fight today so that America can lay its claim to a bit more oil.

Yesterday I experienced something truly beautiful.

As part of being a complete and utter nerd, I occaisionally write scripts for Messenger Plus, one of which is Accentizer, a script which changes certain character combos into European accent characters, e.g. “o::” = “ö”. On the site, I’ve said that if anyone has any questions then they can contact me.

Well, yesterday, someone did just that. Some Spanish bloke called Victor added me on Messenger, and started asking me questions. In Spanish.

Now, I have absolutely no experience of Spanish whatsoever, so the few bits I picked out, such as “¿Habla usted español?”, meaning “Do you speak Spanish?” were complete guesswork.

However, I didn’t want to let this guy down, so I opened up Google Translate, and with the help of my friend who takes Spanish GCSE, I managed to hold a semi-decent conversation with Victor, who wanted to know how to get the script to work.

Afterwards, it struck me just how amazing this was. I was talking to someone 800 miles away, in a language I didn’t understand, about something he had that I’d created. None of this would have been possible without the internet.

Impressive, no?

Right, well. This is all very pretty. The question is, what does it do?

Well, I suppose I should start by introducing myself. I’m Joe, I’m fifteen, and I like drawing, animation and graphic design.