Photo of Gus, a grey and white cat, scowling on a pile of sheets (blurred background image) Photo of Gus, a grey and white cat, scowling on a pile of sheets

About this site and myself

My name is McLean; pronounced məˈklin (ie rhymes with clean, not chin or lane). I have a first name1 but am not in the habit of using it except with my immediate family. If you’re wondering what pronouns to use for me, keep wondering! ie they/them

I am a hobbyist writer, comedian and game developer. By day I work in tech but prefer to keep my work and online lives separate. I live in Narrm in the same apartment as my cat and on the same street as my wife, which I’ll acknowledge is an unusual setup but it works fine for us2. I guess I also like to keep my home and married lives separate? I am a separate lives kind of guy.

This site is a personal blog; the goal of it is to have a place to put things when I have a compulsion to put something somewhere. That function used to be performed by Twitter but, ah, you know how that place is these days. This is probably healthier. In any case, if you’ve found parts of your experience here enjoyable or informative or whatever that’s a delightful side effect, I’m happy that you’ve had a nice time trespassing.

In terms of content: expect political crankery from a left wing perspective and small experiments with game development.

In terms of regularity of updates: I don’t know man, not everything has to be a job.

How to use the site

Read its words and understand them. If you’d like to leave a comment, message me3.

There’s an RSS feed down in the footer of all the posts. There’s a Tags link up the top to an index by topic, and with links to RSS feeds of those too.

Also: you can flip between dark and light mode by clicking the 🌚 🌞 in the header. Cute, hey.

Past works

  • I was a host and editor of Not Good Enough, an auspol podcast that ran for a few years and people really liked it
  • I’ve made a bunch of free games over at my itch.io site
  • I did standup comedy around 2012-2015 and had a couple good shows in MICF and the fringe festivals. If you saw Ghosts Are Real or Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, or any of the instances of The Impossible Showcase good on you, thanks for coming out and supporting the arts
  • I made podcast called Two Wizards that was great but I think its host went down and then a new podcast with the same name got quite popular so that one’s probably lost to time
  • I was an extra on Neighbours a couple times
  • I did some comedy stuff on YouTube wayy back in the late 2000s. Also lost to time; if you’re one of those with fond memories please trust me that they are better left as memories

McLean’s Showing???

Yeah, it was an old toothpaste slogan, “Are your Macleans showing?”. The ads took place in a world where “Macleans” had become a proprietary eponym for teeth, which is a delightfully insane premise for a marketing campaign.

Picture of a tube of Macleans 'big teeth' toothpaste
Specialty product

Luckily for me GlaxoSmithKline’s trademark on the slogan is listed as Removed - Not renewed: Renewal fee not paid so now my name is finally returned to my own sole control. A great injustice finally set right; now I can use it as kind of a weak pun where it can also be read to mean “the thing that McLean has put on display”. Pretty good.

  1. Tom; pronounced tɒm haha ↩︎

  2. I’d live next door to my cat too if I could but there’s responsibilities involved. ↩︎

  3. If you don’t have my contact details I’m sure those of someone else will do just as well. ↩︎