outplayed | open post / overflow

wow

[ also, true! kaiser won't deny it. ]

yes, keep going

For someone who complains about how much torture I put you through, you seem ready to take every new beating.

you should instead praise me for being aware of my flaws and willing to hear new ones
dont ask if you should continue if you arent willing to continue
keep going

I'm not praising you when you don't try to fix those flaws.
And I'm now concerned I may be inadvertently feeding into one of your strange fetishes related to older men berating you.

you shouldnt say that about me
i can accept i have many flaws but that i dont try to better myself is certainly not one of them

[ it's just difficult for him. the world does not appreciate enough, kaiser believes, that he is struggling against his base nature to prefer inertia so strongly every single day. ]

and god forbid you do something that might inadvertently please me...
no, i'm curious, thats all

The more satisfied you are, the more secure you feel, the more you stagnate.
That's true in all things, but it's also another flaw of yours.
But fine, here's another:
You look for the easy way out by unknowingly seeking comfort and validation. You aren't even aware you're doing it until the rug is pulled out from under your feet.
You want to be recognized and revered, even if this status is also harmful to your growth. You're a walking contradiction of a man.

Edited 2025-05-14 03:25 (UTC)

[ it takes a while for kaiser to reply. first, he has to reflect on whether he thinks noa is right about all of this or not — but that actually doesn't take much time, he quickly accepts that noa is more or less correct. michael kaiser is a creature for whom "yearning for love" and "treating with malice" are two sides of the same coin, after all. he sees himself as an object and assumes everybody sees him as one too, which is why he can't help but want external validation — where else does a 'thing' get its value from, other than what humans give it? — even as he thinks of himself as something that can look down on any human being. above all else, he tends towards inertia; he knows his mind is naturally weak, and that he has to throw himself into challenge after challenge to prevent himself from giving into the temptation of giving into the comfort of accepting weakness.

no, what takes time is for him to consider what to say in response to all of that. "gross, stop paying so much attention to me"? if kaiser is honest with himself, it's not as if kaiser doesn't realize that he observes noa quite a lot in turn. and he gives noa opportunity after opportunity to continue observing, so even if the comment is a tacit agreement with what noa says, it feels like a useless deflection.

also, he literally asked for it. ]

then, how do you think that this contradiction that is "michael kaiser" will resolve itself?

I have my thoughts.
But I'm more interested in what you do, not what I think you'll do.
Telling you my hypothesis could taint the experiment that is "you".

[ noa not only accepted he was going to be noticed, evaluated and appraised by the world when he began playing football - he welcomed it. to present his theories to the world and thus be judged by them. they deemed him one of the greatest striker's of the current generation, the best by quantitative and at times qualitative measurement. how did he ascend so high? part of it was through observation, of peers and rivals alike. if kaiser were to complain about the attention he's received, then noa wouldn't be able to counter the allegations.

for all the things he has noticed, he also can't conclude where things will go. humans are all experiments in progress and hypotheticals can be drawn, but the conclusion? it might take another decade of observation with how early kaiser is still in his career. maybe even two? noa doesn't think kaiser is going to crash out of the profession, or at least not since he helped ("tortured" as kaiser put it) course correct him through the NEL. ]

I'll let you know my thoughts after you retire.
You can wait another decade or so, right?

[ at the end of the day, kaiser might call it torture... but he prefers being tortured to having a normal, comfortable existence. for whatever that implies about a lot of things... ]

fair enough.
then write down your thoughts right now so theres a record and your recollections wont be distorted with the passage of time
here, ill even do the same for you so its equal

[ not that kaiser's thoughts on noa's career trajectory are very interesting, and noa can probably predict them, more or less. more notable is the fact that kaiser has elected to not tell noa to not hedge — because he assumes this doesn't need to be said. people aiming for the best in the world have to be bold enough to stick by what they think is right. ]

also, after i retire?? how about after YOU retire...

No.
If I were to give it to you prematurely, you can take that as a sign that I think you have no more room for evolution and growth.
I'll write down my thoughts now as you suggested. Think of it as a time capsule.

i wouldnt...

[ or would he? maybe... it doesn't hurt to protest it, though. ]

then, do an interim report too
one that youll permit me to see when im your age and give me some thoughts on how i want to spend the sunset of my career

No.
I don't want to.

[ 😑 ]

well, it was worth a try.
try to not die before i retire, then, or if you do, be sure to keep those notes in a place id think to look

Wouldn't it be more satisfying to read the notes if you had to go through a series of challenges to unearth them?
I can't make things easy for you. Not even in death.

[ (jk he is just going to leave the notes in his safe, he's not invested enough to make it more complicated than that.) ]

i would, admittedly, be very flattered that you gone girl'd me.

I was thinking more along the lines of Poirot.

[ is this a generational gap or just kaiser's deranged imagination picturing him as a psychopath?? ]

[ kaiser really admires amy, actually, so it's a compliment... ]

i guess that leaves things open for me to gone girl you, then

[ he didn't want to say "you would be more likely to do it to me", so it's good kaiser came to same conclusion on his own! ]

Ok.
Just don't touch my plants when you ruin the living room for the setup.
They are important to me.

[ he's been preparing his equivalent of the cool girl monologue for half his life! ]

i know that
i dont think id have to ruin your living room, though, maybe just push a few pots out of their usual place to catch your attention
i shouldnt give any more away, though, itll ruin the surprise

[ unfortunately (?) noa knows himself well enough to agree that moving a few pots out of their place would be extremely noticeable. ]

What surprise?
I've read the book and seen the movie. I know the general idea of the plotline.

im not going to just plagiarize amy beat for beat, that would be so rude and disrespectful of me

[ don't question why he talks about amy like she's his actual friend. ]

ill put my own spin on things
besides, i promised you all that time ago an intriguing murder-suicide, didnt i? the pieces are starting to come together now...

Disrespectful to the fictional character?

[ please do not kin amy, or patrick bateman, or anyone else for that matter. ]

Anyway yes, you did promise that.
However you promise many things and then you don't deliver, so I'm skeptical.

[ kaiser only wishes that he could kin patrick bateman, but he lacks the prerequisite psychopathy and he sometimes wishes he doesn't. if anything, he thinks he probably has the opposite of whatever his favorite psycho does, because there is an idea of a patrick bateman, but kaiser thinks of himself as an object. alas...

amy, on the other hand...... ]

if i can wait until i retire before i get what i want from you, then you can wait until i retire for me to make good on all my promises
thats just fair, isnt it?
im not rushing because im not worried about it.

You don't worry about a lot of things, and only realize it seconds before disaster.
This is another flaw of yours.

if i started worrying then id probably never stop

[ kaiser knows his own personality well enough... ]

accept this flaw of mine because the alternative is worse, actually

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rationalizer - 2025-05-21 03:19 (UTC) - Expand

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outplayed - 2025-05-21 03:28 (UTC) - Expand