Owen Davie (March 1944-March 2026)

My bit from my dear Dad’s funeral, giving the overview of his life.

Owen was not one to jump into the spotlight and tell his own story. He didn’t like to blow his own trumpet, in both metaphorical and literal contrast to his grandfather Hilmer, a charismatic brass band leader and renowned trombone player. Owen took after his father, Hilmer’s son, Rod, a devoted family man who was most comfortable slightly back and to the side from the limelight.

Owen was a proud Mainlander. He was born in Dunedin to Mina and Rod. Apart from a brief stint where they moved to Gore, he grew up in Dunedin, spending many weekends and holidays at the family crib at Doctors Point.

As a late addition much younger than siblings Rod and Margaret, he spent a lot of time with his mother, going on shopping trips and having a sneaky ice cream at the milk bar. He missed most of his first year at school due to catching measles, then chicken pox, then mumps, and then topping that off by breaking his arm.

He and his schoolfriends filled their weekends with Westerns at the cinema, spectating at rugby matches, building forts in the bush and raiding a neighbour’s trees for apples (this last is notable as one of the very few acts of rebellion you’ll find in my dad’s long life). One of his fellow raiders, John Matthews, remained lifetime friends, including standing up as Owen’s best man at his wedding. Saturday nights were often spent at home, listening to opera or brass band records with his parents and grandparents.

He studied history at Otago, earning a Masters, and throughout his life there would be history books mixed in with the cricket books in his reading pile. During his studies he was also working in what he called his dream job, ushering at Dunedin Town Hall, which gave him the chance to see the Rolling Stones, Peter Paul and Mary, Louis Armstrong, Roy Orbison, Dusty Springfield, Ray Charles, Herman’s Hermits, and his beloved Beatles.

On graduating he came to Wellington for the career opportunities, meeting here another friend who has remained a fixture, Tim Lovell Smith. They set up a flat in 1970, and Owen trained as an archivist, a good match for his interest in research and his meticulous approach. He went around the Pacific checking and setting up Government archives in the Cook Islands, Samoa and Niue.

His career in the civil service led eventually to the Department of Internal Affairs, where he worked in many areas, most of which were incomprehensible to me as a child and largely remain so now I’m an adult. But I do know he was both highly respected and warmly regarded across DIA, and there was a large turnout to his retirement party in 2009.

So his move to Wellington worked out brilliantly for his career but also in another crucial way: that same year he moved to Wellington, 1970, he met Anne Geddes in the Royal Tavern on Lambton Quay. By the end of ‘71 they were married and settled in the Hutt, and Owen’s long years of catching the train in and out began.

He became very close to Anne’s family here, her sister Margaret and her parents Percy and Felice. And soon the four of us started to appear on the scene.

Owen decided he did not want to be separated from his growing family in any way and was baptised. He went on to be very committed to the parish here, serving in a variety of roles, as well as being involved in all our school committees. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when he took up pétanque after retirement, the club spotted those same special attributes and he became club secretary, a position he held for many years. He was even awarded administrator of the year, something he never told me; I only found out when mum included it in her notes for this eulogy. Still learning new things!

What I do know about my Dad, apart from his reticence in telling me he won administrator of the year, is his fundamental kindness. His concern for others. His determination to make sure the windows were all closed and the doors were all locked before he went out somewhere, no matter how much my mother was revving the car engine to hurry him up. And his gentleness.

I hope I can be as gentle, and caring, and kind. Though maybe a bit quicker to leave the house.

What I’ve done with the second half of 2025

This post is going to be a bit shorter than the one for the first half.

As promised: house renovations. We moved out for three months, and there was a significant to-do list before and after that period, so it absolutely dominated the back half of the year. But it was a success! We had been planning to fix our kitchen since moving in 15 years ago, amazing to finally have it sorted, and as part of the flow-on effects we pretty much improved the entire house. Very happy. Walking around still feels a bit weird, like being in a dream where the geography doesn’t quite match reality, but with very nice carpet (not usually a feature of my dreams).

As promised: Morgue’s Basic D&D, an homage to the game that introduced me to the activity that would come to dominate my creative life. Three game releases that I’d planned to get out into the world at the start of 2024, for the 50th anniversary of D&D, but because of Events they sat there at 90% done for a long time. Part of getting them finished was making the cover illustrations, which was very enjoyable. As is obvious, I am an artist of wildly limited ability, but in this era of A.I. everything it was pleasing to put my amateur and imperfect efforts on display!

And that was all that got out the door. I finished the next FiveEvil release, which will come clambering out into the light next year, and made progress on a few other small projects too. Personal life wise, things have achieved a rare stability on many fronts, so that’s good. I’ve maintained my Nick Carraway engagement with social media (within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life), which feels like a sustainable way to get the neat discoveries without letting too much poison into my veins.

I have been overstretched for years and it has taken a toll, but I have successfully dealt to that. My aim in clearing the decks has been to choose mindfully what to take on, and to make time for the things I need in my life, and that I have yet to sort out. There is a really exciting unannounced TTRPG project I’m keen to dive into, and a pile of enticing family history stuff patiently waiting for me, and I have at least one more unpublished novel in me. But also I just need to keep doing the things that keep me mentally healthy, especially the things that have fallen by the wayside in the last year or two. So probably setting up some good habits there is my real priority for 2026.

And will I write the essay on Predator: Badlands and what it says about secondary worlds and intellectual property, the one that literally no-one has begged me for? We’ll see how we go!

Now we have sun

I’ve been thinking about, and later worrying about, climate change almost my whole life. As a kid reporter for the newspaper (back when there was a kid reporter page in the newspaper/back when there was a newspaper) I worked on a story on the greenhouse effect in the late 80s. The focus then was on CFCs and the ozone hole, which problem was essentially solved, but the bigger challenge remained: human activity is messing with the atmosphere and the consequences would be enormous.

Climate change led me into paying attention to politics (hello Green Party) and into academia (hello small group action) and for the many years I blogged regularly, I returned to the subject over and over.

And I’ve never seen a moment as exciting as this.

Back in 2006 I declared “now we have won”, that the great argument over whether climate change is real has been decided and now the question was what action would be taken. I’m pretty happy with calling that moment as the tipping point. The question of action though has been vexed. But solutions got stuck: human society is so heavily built on fossil fuels that trying to move away from them seemed to inevitably result in some path of greater hardship. People don’t vote for hardship. As things got observably worse on a scarily swift timeline, it was easy to get despondent. It seemed like we needed a miracle!

Now We Have Won

And, not a moment too late, we got one.

Solar is the answer. The right incentives were put in place after that 2006 tipping point to allow investment into the technology, and improvements came, and more improvements, and suddenly it was getting better faster than anyone predicted or expected, on one of those s-curve paths beloved of tech evangelists.

All the climate nerds I follow have been excited about solar for the last few years, and it keeps getting better. The numbers are staggering. Solar is the answer. The economics are absolutely clear: fossil fuels are old tech. Solar is VASTLY better, cheaper, more reliable, more environmentally friendly.

The basis of the science-fiction future is already here. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to let it slowly outcompete fossil fuels. That industry is enormously powerful and is doggedly fighting any attempt to dislodge it, and the pollution it creates is locking in worse and worse climate change. The challenge now is to break the political hold fossil fuels maintain over the world so solar can take its place in time to keep us all safe.

It’s great to see Bill McKibben in a different mode, a positive mode, celebrating as much as focusing on the fight ahead.

Like William Gibson said, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Changing that will be a good fight.

(By the way: nuclear is not the answer. Almost every climate nerd I follow made peace with nuclear power years ago, but solar still beats it on every metric.)

What i’ve done with the first half of 2025

Clearing the decks has been a focus for a while now, and it has finally worked out. So here’s a marker, as we hit the halfway point of 2025, where I’m at.

FiveEvil is done. A horror roleplaying game using a smart remix of the most well-known set of rules there is. It’s out in PDF, and physical preorder is on the way, and I am so so proud of it.

Stay in the Fight is done. A personal memoir of family and struggle by a good friend. It’s out on Amazon now as ebook and POD. Innis’s story is engaging and valuable and he tells it well, his way.

Kill Your Grandad (the game) is done. A black-comedy tabletop roleplaying game about teenage time-travelling nihilists. It’s out in PDF and Print on Demand. (As some of you know, I’ve also written a novel which is a different riff on the same conceptual ground, they are designed to complement each other. Someday i’ll figure out what to do about the novel. I think it’s pretty good.)

KiwiRPG week happened. I’ve managed to step away from this org after being massively involved in setting it up, and it’s great to see it rolling along. I did a lot of comms for it this year.

Submitted on two government bills that demanded opposition. Good work me.

House renovations are happening. We’ve been talking about this for over a decade, and have officially set things in motion. This will give me plenty to do in the coming months.

Also released one episode of my weekly podcast. And walked the dogs a lot. And (most importantly) really looked after my mental health.

Pretty good, I reckon. What next? There’s a FiveEvil follow-up on the way, of course, but I’m also going to get one more thing out of the 90% done column and into the done column:

Regulatory Standards Bill submission

Finally got around to reading this Bill on the last day subs are open. Made these notes (on Bluesky, thinking out loud).

  • It seems to be “if your legislation doesn’t match ACT-style libertarian principles, you need to admit it and wear a sign saying NOT LIBERTARIAN ENOUGH” which has various emergent consequences if embedded in a system.
  • 8 (l) legislation should be the most effective, efficient, and proportionate response to the issue concerned that is available. Is *this bill* the most effective and efficient response to the (supposed) issue of poor-quality regulation? A new legal obligation and oversight board?
  • Creating regulations is always about complex trade-offs on many dimensions. The Bill’s proposed principles are a narrow set of political priorities, not universal concerns, and as such using them as a universal measuring stick is farcical.
  • Surely a future government would just immediately repeal this rather than repeatedly hold up a “not libertarian enough” sign? And if that’s the case, this whole Bill is a waste of effort, right? You can’t legislate norms
  • The principles by which regulation might be judged are not, probably can’t be, settled. The Regulatory Standards Bill would force subsequent governments to pre-concede a particular political framework. It’s an attempt to win a political argument by legislating that you won.
  • basically, (1) any set of principles is inherently political & contestable, this legislation reaches too far in declaring such a set; (2) where specific principles are widely agreed (e.g. role of courts), this Bill is an extremely heavy-handed way to increase conformity even if such is needed

After thinking about it on a dog walk and then later on another dog walk, I turned that into a submission, which is reproduced below. (Unmentioned in this sub is how disgusted I am by the antics of David Seymour online, encouraging his followers to jeer at people who have voiced opposition to the Bill. He is a grotesque hypocrite and a perpetual irritant.)

My submission on the Regulatory Standards Bill

The Regulatory Standards Bill is bad law. While acknowledging other submissions will raise many areas of concern, I will focus on two that stand out to me as sufficient reason not to progress this poorly-conceived bill into law.

1) The heart of the Bill is the set of Principles given in s8. As designed, the Bill demands all new regulations be tested against these principles, and a clear statement is required when there is an inconsistency.

This set of principles is not a generally accepted set of norms for responsible regulation. To the contrary, the principles contain political stances that are heavily contested within the NZ Parliament. 8(b) in particular is an example of such a political claim. The heavily contested nature of the construction within 8(b) is plainly evident in the response to this Bill, and in years of discussion and argument about how “liberty” should properly be represented in the laws that govern society.

By the same token, other Principles that might be widely held as important to responsible regulation by key constituencies, such as consideration of Te Tiriti or climate crisis, are entirely absent. 

This Bill is an attempt to leapfrog political debate and embed a particular political position within the legislative process. This is improper, in that it treats an active debate as a settled one. It is antidemocratic, in that it attempts to legally privilege some perspectives over others. And finally, and most importantly, it is unwise, in that it will lead inevitably to this legislation either being repealed entirely, or becoming a repository for an endlessly revised set of principles that reflect the political goals of the government of the day. 

This reason alone is enough to strike down this Bill now.

2) Secondly, the Bill proposes a legislative reportiing requirement from Ministers for all proposed new regulations, and then builds an elaborate further system complete with a newly constituted Board, in order to achieve its aims. Even on those principles that might be broadly held (e.g. 8(i) on the importance of consultation with those affected by law), the structure imposed by this Bill would be far in excess of what is demanded by the problem. Principle 8(l) says legislation should be the most effective, efficient, and proportionate response to the issue concerned that is available; this system is none of those things, but instead creates work for a fresh bureaucracy. Other avenues that are more effective, efficient, and proportionate exist: taking the pressure off the public service to do more, faster, with fewer people, for example. Policy makers in public service are highly skilled and highly principled but wildly overstretched, and dealing with that is surely the most obvious first step to address the problem claimed by this Bill.

This reason, too, is sufficient to strike down the Bill.

This Bill should not be progressed, as it is improper, antidemocratic, unwise, and unnecessary. It is badly conceived and would make bad law.

Square birthday

I just turned 49. Yes, it’s a big one! A square birthday, seven lots of seven years. My last square birthday was when I turned 36 in 2012, and my next one will arrive (cross fingers) in 2040.

A square birthday is a great opportunity to take stock. How has my life worked out across those seven even pieces of seven years?

0-6: I was born and learned to be human. I lived a life of immense privilege, which is to say, i was surrounded by happy and kind family, economically secure and untouched by major trauma or instability; many do not have such luck in the lottery of birth.

7-13: I found a path. My creative energies and cultural interests fired up and fixed on the things that occupy me to this day: narratives and interactivity, writing and gameplay, performance and emotion.

14-20: I became, properly, me. My sense of self clicked into place after a few years of determined self-interrogation. I fell in love a bit, and thought hard about what that meant. I developed a metaphysics about my own identity and what it is to live in the world. I started being creatively ambitious and saw that I could be a leader when I wanted.

21-27: I started making some bigger moves, with creative projects, with community efforts, with my own life. Went to the other side of the world, to see just how big it was. Met the love of my life in this chunk of time, too.

28-34: Deconstructed all of it. Went back to first principles. Came home transformed. Followed the possibilities I came across. Returned to academia to pursue an insight that was uniquely mine, wrote a novel that pushed me to the limit, started seeking work in those narrow areas for which I was uniquely suited. None of it came to anything, of course, but it was rewarding nonetheless. Then got civil unioned, and became a parent, which immediately overshadowed all else.

35-41: Everything outside fell away around being a Dad for a young child. Unprecedented sensation that i was in the right place doing the right thing whenever I was with them. Also, dog!

42-now: Dad for an older child, against a world of rapidly increasing upset and chaos. Being a stable force against instability occupied my thoughts and emotions. Also did some of the best creative work of my life. However, I was holding too much, and by the end of this time I began to break. It humbled me.

What is coming next? I really don’t know. “Dad” means a different thing nowadays. The world is getting more unstable, not less. And we have two dogs. But it’s good to cast an eye back over this, and see each block being laid that together give me now a place to stand.

I’m just going to try and look after people, and make some interesting things, and breathe deep and sure and calm.

Submission on the Treaty Principles Bill

Submitted on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, on the official website. Submissions remain open until 7 January.

The Treaty Principles Bill would be disastrous to the future wellbeing of Aotearoa and should be rejected with sufficient force and clarity as to damage any future attempt to revive it.

I endorse the submissions of many other organisations, and also the advice of the Waitangi Tribunal and the Regulatory Impact Statement from the Ministry of Justice, as to the deficiencies of this Bill. In particular, I oppose this Bill’s attempt to remove indigenous rights by referendum.

Indigenous rights do exist, as an historical fact by virtue of the Treaty arrangement made between two peoples on the European settlement of Aotearoa, as a legal fact by virtue of international jurisprudence around Treaty and colonisation law, and as an ethical fact by virtue of the natural justice that must accrue to the descendants of those harmed and deprived by systematic exploitation approved by the colonial government. The Bill’s purpose is ill-founded.

Furthermore, putting indigenous rights to public referendum is a grotesque proposal given the extensive popular misunderstanding of crucial facts about this nation’s history and the well-founded grievances of Māori. These misunderstandings are loudly encouraged by bad actors fomenting social division for varied self-serving reasons, and by an international context of so-called ‘culture war’ that is clouding our ability to perceive and manage ourselves as a distinct nation. In such an environment of loud but misplaced opinion, a public referendum poses a profound risk of creating injustice.

Even accepting the premise of the Bill that the Treaty Principles should be revised, a good faith effort to do so in the manner proposed could only begin by launching an extensive effort to educate and inform citizens about Aotearoa New Zealand history, de-prioritise contrarian disinformation sources, and speak honestly about what our society really is. In the absence of any attempt at such a project, it is necessary to conclude that this Bill is presented in bad faith, as an attempt to take advantage of misinformed public sentiment to remove the proper rights of a people who remain disadvantaged by profound and systematic harms. 

There is no place for this Bill. It can do no good, only harm. 

Wait did Generation X win??

It is required, whenever you post about Gen X, to include an image of OK Soda, even though OK Soda wouldn’t be remembered at all without the art by Dan Clowes and Charles Burns, OK Soda was in fact a branding success, in this essay I will

On the latest episode of the Why Is This Happening podcast, host Chris Hayes chats with McKay Coppins about the incoherence in the Trump Republicans. It’s a great listen in general, but I took particular note of their suggestion of how Reagan’s three-legged stool has been roundly rejected by US voters. It made my ears perk up because it fed into a line of thought I’ve been stuck in for a while about Generation X, my generation, and the failure of everything we tried to do. Maybe it’s come around a bit more than I realised?

Hayes and Coppins suggest that stool is wobbly these days. The Iraq War took out voter support for the foreign intervention leg, and the GFC wrecked voter support for fiscal hawks, and I can’t help but notice that those are two things Gen X resistance had at its heart. So I dare to wonder, maybe, in a roundabout sort of way, without even trying in the end, Gen X politics won after all?

As much as we had politics! Late Gen X like me came up in a strange moment, as Anil Dash noted resonantly the other day. We had the Battle of Seattle, yes, but mostly we just floated around feeling excluded from power and influence, while quietly waiting for bigotry to die out with the old people who held those views (because, of course, bigotry was something old people did, and would go away by itself).

And this is what I’ve been stuck on, for ages now: just how much we failed. Everything I associate with the political concerns of my cohort just had zero impact. No Logo and Manufacturing Consent and indymedia and One No Many Yeses and the biggest global protest in history and none of it did shit. Every bad thing came true anyway.

(And then it got worse from there.)

The analysis in this podcast (and I am of course predisposed to believe it but also I think it’s evident in the public rhetoric of Trumpist politics) suggests that, as much as it’s hard to perceive, the big picture is that those Gen X politics, my politics, have actually become widespread. Sure, it’s because the world got completely broken twice over, and it doesn’t reflect a principled engagement with the values espoused on the Lilith Fair stage, and it has nothing to do with how persuasive those issues of Adbusters were, but I reckon we can safely put all that under the generationally appropriate headline “ironic”. Despite everything we tried to push the world there, it ended up heading so far in the other direction it looped around to the right sort of place anyway.

The sad thing of course is what has happened to the third leg. Social conservatism has grown huge and vigorous in ways unthinkable to younger me, and even with two stool legs gone, the Republicans remain robust enough to win a popular majority of US voters. Fascism is no longer a weird rump belief system akin to Flat Earth (which, not coincidentally, is also back). Cruelty is in.

I think my point, if I have one, is that maybe I don’t need to feel too despairing about the Gen X project, and all the stuff I cared about, and how I listened so carefully to the lyrics of those Rage Against The Machine songs and pretended not to notice that most people weren’t doing the same as they jumped up and down. Because (munters aside) we were right, and we were proven right, and maybe there are now a lot of people out there who basically agree with what we were trying to say.

And maybe that means that the political conversation can, possibly, move forward?

Maybe… there is a good bit of hope to be had?

I can’t believe that fascism and fear-driven hatred are a sustainable basis for a political project. And without the other legs, the US right wing is surely going to break over it. I hope it happens sooner than later, because while it stands it can and will do tremendous harm.

I hope there are good folks ready to take advantage of that moment, when it comes.

Anyway I went back to this the other day, the 2020 re-up of Fight The Power, and though it already seems like it comes from a million years ago, it felt good. Check it.

Obligatory Trump Post

Everyone with a blog is contractually obliged to write a post about the 2024 U.S. election result, here’s mine.

So that’s how it is.

There’s something kind of freeing about it: we’re in the bad timeline. The majority of U.S. citizens who got off their backside to vote wanted Donald Trump in the chair. Despite. (Or, in a non-trivial-but-unclear-%-of-cases, because.)

“He is a danger to democracy and the world” was true and far outweighed every other thing at stake, but it was apparently poor messaging.

“Inflation and immigrants are out of control” was apparently great messaging. It was also not true.

What we can learn from this is: when fascism is on the rise, it’s important not to say anything about it because it’s a turnoff? hmm doesn’t seem right.

***

Social psychology is my area. I have enough expertise in it to know I don’t have any expertise in it. But here’s what I can say with some confidence:

With rare exceptions, human behaviour isn’t reasoned out from information.

But this doesn’t mean the information environment – Fox News as the background noise of an entire swathe of the U.S.A. – isn’t meaningful or influential. We are all surrounded by stories, and they are extremely powerful.

We remember stories that explain the emotions we feel when looking at our local situation.

We like the stories that make us feel good about our emotional reactions. We call these stories “important” and “true”.

We dislike the stories that make us feel bad about our emotional reactions. We call these ones “unimportant” or “lies”.

We like it when our neighbours agree with us about which stories are true and which ones are lies. We can repeat those stories a bunch, getting more assertive every time. It’s a way of validating our emotional reactions, and building an alliance with those who share the same feelings.

Fox News and similar are very good at circulating and repeating stories that validate a certain set of emotional reactions, and ridiculing stories that could undermine those emotions. That’s the whole game.

An entire generation has grown up in the bubble of these social norms. The specific stories have changed – a few years ago, the story about Trans people changed in a major way, for example – but the underlying emotions have not.

The information environment is really a normative environment. It’s an enormous permission machine, saying it’s okay to feel angry and afraid and disgusted, in fact it’s expected. All you need to do is look around you. You’re not alone.

The people who voted for President Trump, even the so-called “low-information voters”, know enough about what he is: the consensus choice for people who feel the same as they do.

And feelings don’t care about your facts.

***

It is possible to shift social norms by transforming the information in an information environment, but it’s much easier to do so by transforming the emotions experienced by ordinary folks. Homosexual law changes didn’t arise from information, but from people meeting gay folks in their own lives and finding they were just ordinary folks. Different emotions at ground level changed the whole thing.

It’s bloody hard for a political campaign to shift either emotions or information. The media can, sometimes. Unfortunately 21st century journalism has decided that’s not its job. Easier to report on the horse race than to try and actively shift the profound misunderstandings held by one voting bloc about fundamentals like crime and the economy.

***

It’s not good, is it. But before all is said and done, I reckon a few more Nazis are gonna get punched in the face.

My game is on Kickstarter right now

It’s called FiveEvil: Fiendish 5E Horror.

It’s a tabletop roleplaying-game, like Dungeons & Dragons, only it is for playing horror.

I like horror, even though I’m a bit of a scaredy cat. Sometimes I have to turn a movie off and finish it the next day while the sun is up.

And I really like horror in games. There’s something about scary times and playing creative games with your buddies that really works for me. I think it’s just a special thing to do. So making this game has been a nightmare come true.

FiveEvil is being released by Handiwork Games. It is on Kickstarter now! It has already funded at basic level and we are trying to keep spreading the word so we can make the book exceptional, with more amazing art by Scott Purdy, and a bonus extra scenario by Gar Hanrahan, and more treats!

Getting the word out has been incredibly hard. Social media has collapsed as a way to share the creative projects we are all working on. Specialist journalism has also mostly collapsed so most of the outlets that might have covered us are missing in action. It’s tough!

If you are reading this – and you know someone who might like FiveEvil – please tell them! It might be the only way they could ever hear about it!

Scary best wishes everyone!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonhodgsonmaptiles2/fiveevil/description

P.S I’m trapped in a telly send help!!