Windows Paint LOL?
Yes. Well, Windows Paint 3D, actually. I’m no luddite. And now on a Mac Mini using Windows booted up in Parallels, for no other purpose than to run Paint. MS Paint has served me well.
I got to grips with it before sight loss made it very difficult to learn anything. Not that I’d want to. Windows Paint 3D forever.
The Reboot and Accessibility
The cats were on a glaring white background until progressive sight loss got in the way. In my case Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) causes severe intolerance of white backdrops, bright images and the first 416 episodes of Matchstick Cats. Also sunlight, sunglasses, artificial light, darkness and cyclists. In fact I stopped using my PC entirely for almost four years. Don’t worry, the rest of this page is fun. Also your mom.
Vintage Matchstick Cats Reduxed:
I’ve begun a rough and ready conversion of early Matchstick Cats episodes to dark backgrounds, while tidying up the text where needed: Vintage Matchstick Cats Reduxed.
About Matchstick Cats the webcomic
Since 2003 Irish amateur humourist, sage, socially awkward cat obsessive and later cat owner Neal O’Carroll has honed the art of starting comedic writings with no idea how the first sentence will end, never mind what he will say.
From an early age (27) O’Carroll was starting sentences with “Two Cats walk into a Bar” more frequently than his peers. (Some early results a can be seen in the Writings section)
Starting in 2004 with nonsense humour column Neal’s Belch on the original NewsBurp.com* humour site, he soon adapted the method to writing simple, dialogue-heavy stick figure webcomics to accompany his writings. Originally with the short-lived Matchstick Meditations, consisting of a matchstick man talking nonsense to the camera.
By the end of the year this had evolved into Matchstick Cats, And the rest is similarly uninteresting.
By 2006, Neal was using the same method to create improvised comedy molologues on his Into Your Head podcast, which has since clocked up eight hundred episodes. The last couple of hundred are quite listenable. Meanwhile, he made an apparently disposable solemn promise to himself never to write his own “About” page in the third person.
In 2020, having not used a computer in almost four years, O’Carroll returned with a reboot of Matchstick Cats, among other things converting the cats from their origianal black outlines on a white “page” to white outlines on a black backdrop, so that he could see the frigging thing.
Matchstick Cats’ comeback inspired O’Carroll’s subsequent revival of comedy podcast Into Your Head in November 2023: About Into Your Head podcast
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***no relation to Newsburp podcast, a fellow Irish comedy show and blog that used that owned NewsBurp.com for a few years before it reverted to this site.