Meme Monday: Miscellaneous Memes for March 2026

As usual, time to go and rummage through my pile of memes that I haven't used yet. So... Have fun!

Yeah, it's a problem that MMOs tend to have.
From Imgflip.

Because meeting at a tavern is so blase.
From Quickmeme.

I laughed when I saw this. From Facebook.

From Tiktok.

Ha! I'd be buff too! From Shen Comix.

Me too... Yes, me too...
From Tumblr.

I Don't think I Could Sit for That Long

Over the course of the past several days, I watched Jeff Kaplan's interview with Lex Fridman. I was clued into it by Josh Strife Hayes, and after his commentary about it I searched and found the full 5+ hour interview on YouTube:

Yes, it's 5 hours 10 minutes.

And yes, it's worth the full time. 

But yes, that full length meant I broke down the interview into 1 hour chunks. (Your mileage may vary.)

From my perspective, there are three big takeaways from the interview:

• He's seen some shit.
  
  

  

  "That was just the biggest 'fuck you' moment I had
  in my career. It felt surreal to be in that condition..."
  Screencap from the interview.

  
  Maybe I'm reading too much into the look on his face, but he gives off that thousand yard stare at times. I look at him and think that this is what I'd look like if I hadn't changed jobs back in 2001. (My kids would say that about some of my more recent foibles, but I'm not so sure. I guess it's left as an exercise to the people who know me to provide details.)
  
  
  
  
• The corporate execs at the end were complete idiots who only saw things through the lens of dollar signs.
  
  Yes, you can say that any business is in it to make money, but when some of the shenanigans that went on with Overwatch went down, Jeff had finally had it and left. I'll leave it to you to find the spot in the interview, because the full interview provided the amount of heft of what leaving Blizzard meant to Jeff. Lex did bleep out some specific numbers to protect Jeff's NDA, but regardless I felt like punching a wall or something when I saw that part. 
  
  
  

  

  From Rick and Morty.

  
  Jeff had every right to be upset, and I'm sure that I could find out exactly who he was talking about in that part of the interview, but I'd really rather not dwell on the injustice of it all. Jeff wasn't the one overpromising on the Overwatch League, and he was the one caught in the crosshairs of trying to keep riding the Overwatch wave and keeping it fresh while working on Overwatch 2. 
  
  
• Jeff is proof that you do not need an IT or a business degree to leave your mark in gaming. His degree is in creative writing, and it was his passion for gaming that eventually led to his employment at Blizzard. While yes, he's often poked fun of for making the original Green Hills of Stranglethorn questline in WoW (he talks about that in the interview, by the way) I'm also confident that he had a big hand in the Defias questline that I love so much. In the interview, he mentioned that Pat Nagle worked on quests for Elwynn Forest and he took Westfall, which meant that he was working on quests in the heart of the Defias territory. 

It's a fascinating interview, and I'm glad that Jeff seems to be slowly coming out of his funk after leaving Blizzard. Now I really want to read Play Nice by Jason Schreier, about the rise and fall of Blizzard Entertainment.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Okay, the reference to both Queen and the movie Highlander aside, nobody lives for that long. Even with today's medicine, the oldest verified* living person was (according to Wikipedia) a touch over 122 years old. Life and death are a natural cycle, and while that has been long known we also have a long history of wishing for immortality. (Or at least a much longer lifespan.)

I'm not going to get into the weeds as to why we as a species tend to collectively want that --whether here or in an afterlife-- but instead I want to look at how we write about species/races with vastly different lifespans than ours.

Let's get the big one out of the way, shall we?

This was the version I had as a kid.
I have no idea whatever became of it.
From Ebay.

We write what we know, so we project our lives, our understanding, and our emotions onto anything we create. Frequently that includes animals that don't live as long as us. Anthropomorphizing dogs and cats and other animals that we know and love is pretty typical for us as a species --101 Dalmatians, anyone?-- and in terms of aging we basically compress our own human experience into the lifespan of said animals assuming it's a direct 1:1 correspondence.** 

Of course, that's not exactly the case. Other animals are not us, and while they may have individual personalities, they don't have the sense of impending death that we have. That means our understanding of the eventual end of life doesn't impact what other animals experience; while we may not know exactly what your doggo is thinking about things, it's pretty likely that they don't have any real thoughts of the Rainbow Bridge like we do.***

***

Okay, that's us looking at the lifespan of animals, but what about our examination of other races/species that are much older than us?

There's a quote by the Science Fiction writer/editor John W. Campbell****  about approaching alien intelligence that applies here: “Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man or better than a man, but not like a man.”

The "other" big one that we might as well talk about are the Elves and Dwarves of Middle-earth.

Alan Lee's cover of The Tale of Beren
and Lúthien by JRR Tolkien. Star-crossed
lovers from two separate races, Beren
and Lúthien represented Tolkien and his wife, Edith,
as they came from two separate worlds.

Elves are immortal, assuming they don't die due to violence or merely wasting away,***** and while Dwarves are mortal their lifespan is much greater than that of normal humans. Even the Númenóreans, descendants of Men who fought alongside Elves in the Elder Days, have a much longer lifespan than that of the "regular" folk. 

Our experiences of Elves in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings really was that of wise counselors and background commentators for the main characters. They provide the world's exposition and a sense of the weight of tasks ahead; think of Dumbledore's "here's what happened" part at the end of the first few Harry Potter books and you get the idea. 

I've mentioned this before --unfortunately since Google doesn't have this blog indexed I can't easily find it-- but when Fantasy authors put together timelines stretching thousands of years as if it's not a big deal, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Think of it this way: the entirety of Middle-earth's Third Age was over 3000 years, which puts the equivalent in our time to be ~975 BCE. The Zhou Dynasty in China, divided rulership in Egypt, splitting of the Kingdom of Israel into two, the gradual rise of the Assyrian Empire and decline in the old Babylonian Empire, and the rise of the Olmecs. So, looking at all the upheaval that's happened from that time to today, the timeline presented by Tolkien in the LotR appendices is incredibly simplistic. No country/nation has lasted 3000 years in our world (the current nation of Egypt bears no resemblance to the Medieval Mamluks, much less the Hellenistic Ptolemaic or the New Kingdom), yet Gondor and the Elven kingdoms remained (relatively) intact and with a similar political structure over that time. Sure, some empires have come and gone, but nothing even close to what we've seen in the real world.

However, as time in Middle-earth has progressed, the Elves gradually retreated from view and the political stage as they left Middle-earth for the Undying Lands. Even the threat of Sauron didn't mean armies of Elves marching against him in the War of the Ring --Peter Jackson's movies notwithstanding-- and the Battle of the Five Armies from The Hobbit was the Largest military action the Elder Race performed in the latter half of the Third Age.

In one sense, the gradual retreat of the Elves from view, leaving the world to the mortal races, is rather natural. If you're an Elf you don't change, but everything else around you does. Men, Dwarves, Hobbits, and woodland creatures all grow old and die, and you don't. In the Elves, that manifests in terms of grief and weariness#, which is why they're drawn to the Undying Lands where they'll find a respite from the world's mortality. 

"My son, years come when hope will fade, and beyond them little is clear to me. And now a shadow lies between us. Maybe, it has been appointed so, that by my loss the kingship of Men may be restored. Therefore, though I love you, I say to you: Arwen Undomiel shall not diminish her life's grace for less cause. She shall not be the bride of any Man less than the King of both Gondor and Arnor. To me even then our victory can bring only sorrow and parting - but to you hope of joy for a while. Alas, my son! I fear that to Arwen the Doom of Men may seem hard at the ending."

--From The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, The Return of the King, Appendix A

Tolkien obviously put in a lot of thought to the immortality of the Elves on a racial and personal level, particularly in regards to the personal cost of what immortality (and the rejection thereof) brings to a person and their family. However, I think he missed the mark on the resulting societal impact of immortality. In the end, the Elves' society didn't really grow or change over time, but rather tended toward stagnation and calcification. 

***

Now that I think about it, if there's one common thread among immortal or extraordinarily long-lived people in fiction or gaming, it's that we really don't know what it would be like from a social or societal aspect to have a race of extremely long lived or immortal people around. Or even a couple of people, for that matter. Would they calcify and be gradually consumed by grief and weariness, such as Tolkien's Elves? Would they dominate society like the Emperor of Mankind in Warhammer 40k? Would they become more rigid and black/white in their worldview?

Would they lose what makes us human: the ability to connect on a personal level to someone, to feel intense emotion, to love and grieve, to emphasize, to be willing to sacrifice for the betterment of others?

While there's a lot of Fantasy and Science Fiction that does grapple with what it means to be immortal, in pop culture there's frequently a lot of hand waving about immortality as this weighty topic gets in the way of the story, but I think this is something that can't be avoided forever. Merely hand-waving a character as immortal and yet having them act like, well, a regular person is missing the boat. 

Yes, I pulled this out from my Meme Monday
on Age Disparity Memes. From Imgflip.

Obviously, the physical part of being immortal is one thing, and the impact of immortality is most often presented that way in stories and video games. 

The elves parted, and out of their midst came an elfmaiden who walked forward to stand beside the Speaker. At sight of her, Caramon's mouth sagged open. Riverwind's eyes widened. Even Raistlin stared, his eyes seeing true beauty at last, for no hint of decay touched the young elfmaiden.

--From Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, pg. 323.

That impression by Raistlin, where his eyes could only see the gradual decay of all living things, really hit home the concept that Elves had such a long lifespan in AD&D 1e that Laurana appeared to have no decay at all. Back in those days, the lifespan of AD&D 1e Elves were about 4000 years, so yea, point taken.

"The more you know...." From 9GAG.

And given that the average video game player doesn't really think too much beyond stats and physical attributes when creating a character, I guess it's not a very great surprise that pop culture focuses on that the most. 

If you're one of those in the back raising their hand and saying "Yeah, but I do!! I care!!" I'm right there with you. After all, I played tabletop RPGs, and I've read a metric ton of SF&F, so yeah, I've got opinions about excessively long life or immortality.

Another way of looking at intra-species
romances. From the Pathfinder comic Hollow
Mountain, posted on Reddit.

The problem is, we look at it purely from the angle of physical lifespan and who will outlive who, but a larger question is how does the longer-lived person behave toward others? Do they look at their short-lived brethren as merely cattle? As playthings? As children to be parented (either strictly or gently)? As the Great Unwashed, who need religious and social purity imposed upon them? As agents of chaos, to be destroyed? Or an annoyance, to be either disposed with or ignored at your whim?

For me, one thing is certain: people who have abnormally long or immortal lifespans behave significantly different than everybody else. 

Garion looked at the old man whose white hair and beard seemed somehow luminous in the morning sun. "What's it like to live forever, Grandfather?" he asked.

"I don't know," Wolf said. "I haven't lived forever."

"You know what I mean."

"The quality of life isn't much different," Wolf said. "We all live as long as we need to. It just happened that I have something to do that's taken a very long time." He stood up abruptly. "This conversation's taken a gloomy turn," he said.

--From Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings, pg. 258.

As you could probably figure out, I disagree with David Eddings' presentation of Belgarath in The Belgariad. From a story standpoint it works fine, but I'm under no illusions that The Belgariad is anything other than a fun romp of a story. If a person is 7000 years old, I have a very hard time believing that they would behave no different than any other human. If we are the sum of our experiences, hundreds or thousands of years are a LOT of extra experiences that literally nobody living (or dead) could possibly comprehend. Plus, memory is a bitch and that's when people live our current lifespan. Can you imagine trying to remember something that happened 500 years ago, or 1000? We don't even remember what we had for breakfast a couple of months ago, much less things far longer ago than a human has ever been alive. 

There's also something to be said about how our experiences shape us as people, and if we've done one thing for a long time we tend to look at everything through that restrictive lens. That's just for those of us with a normal lifespan, so extend that out several centuries and what have you got? Someone who strictly adheres to one singular viewpoint to the exclusion of all else. If you think it's hard for a normal human to break out from their prejudices and perceive other points of view, just try to do that if you're 1000 or 5000 or 10000 years old and have had centuries or millennia to build up your worldview. 

At least he admits it. From Reddit.

***

I was thinking about this when I realized that the freakiest thing that any NPC ever said to me in WoW was this:

Yeek.

Think about the implications of power and vision that statement had. In the hands of anybody else short of a god it would be hubris at best and insanity at worst. But only someone with the age and prestige and power of the Dragon Queen could pull that off. Even then, becoming all chummy with you later on just kind of lost the plot as far as the immortality of Alexstrasza is concerned. In terms of age and power imbalance, it's a lot closer to one of us befriending a dog.

Which reminds me...

From Reddit.

Yeah, sounds about right.

*There's plenty of unverified ages over 122 in history, but given what we know about physiology that's likely inaccurate, to put it politely.

**Stick a pin in that; we'll see that again later.

***Given that the so-called cognitive revolution (roughly 50k-60k years ago) gave us the capacity to perform imaginative thoughts, we'd have been in the same boat as our canine friends were it not for that. I realize it can be a bit dense and a harsh authorial voice at times, but Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari covers this cognitive revolution fairly well in the initial part of the book. 

****Most well known for his decades of running Astounding Science Fiction/Analog Science Fiction during the Golden Era of SF, Campbell can be a bit of a controversial figure. I was first introduced to him throughout the essays in Isaac Asimov's Asimov on Science Fiction. If you can find a used copy around, it's very much worth a read.

*****It feels weird reading in stories and in biographies about "wasting sickness" and only later realizing that the author or biographer likely was referring to what we now call cancer.

#I've read a ton of Tolkien over the years, and so the only book I can definitively point to for some of this is The Silmarillion, although Unfinished Tales might have parts of it.

Okay, Break's Over

One thing I learned while I was away from MMOs for a week was that the world doesn't end if I stop playing.

Okay, that's a bit of hyperbole, but given how FOMO-driven video games tend to be these days, you'd be forgiven if you thought that the weight of the (virtual) world rested on your shoulders.*

That's the sort of quip that I could see Seth
McFarlane make. From Reddit.

I have wondered whether I have the willpower to give up playing WoW again, especially given that I do have an active circle of friends in-game, which is something that simply did not exist in 2014.** That wasn't why I took the break, but the knowledge that there were people who would notice if I weren't around certainly kept me on edge to a degree. 

Sure enough, after the weekend I got pinged by my Questing Buddy to see if I was doing okay. While we hadn't actually played together in-game for close to a year now --she having gone down the hardcore route to complete all the raids (and even managing to get an Atiesh)-- we do still chat regularly, and she and the rest of the group had noticed my absence even though it was only 3-4 days at that point. After assuring her I was fine, just doing other things for a while, I concluded that I couldn't simply vanish unlike 2014 (and to a lesser extent in 2022). 

From The Simpsons (via Tenor).

So when I felt ready to login once more last Friday evening, I discovered a few items of note: my friends were doing their own thing as they always had, and that the active population on the Anniversary servers had shrunk.

The former wasn't a surprise to me at all, since everybody in our friends' group has their own goals and are currently pursuing them, but the latter was. After a few weeks of upwards of 20 layers' worth of active players on the Anniversary Servers, we were down to 9 or 10 layers over this past weekend. 

The layers as of 6:51 Server Time
on Dreamscythe-US on March 16, 2026.

Now admittedly I'm not sure if people in instances count against layers, but given that players were chain-running 5-person instances once the Dark Portal opened, I really doubt there'd be much of a change in population simply because Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, and Magtheridon's Lair had opened up. I think what is currently happening is that people either burned out rushing to L70 and getting attuned as quickly as possible, or that people are merely raid logging because they can. 

I haven't been to Outland yet, but given that the main hub there, Shattrath City, is connected to the other major cities via Trade Chat, I know that people haven't been pulling out the "I'm Bored" complaint as is often found in MMOs, so I suspect it's merely raid logging for now. 

***

Well, I'm refreshed. 

And I'm back to doing the same thing I had been doing, which was leveling Briganaa 2.0, and to a lesser extent my Blood Elf pair of toons. If the in-game population of the Anniversary servers continues to decline, by the time I reach Outland I will have the place to myself as everybody will be raid-logging and not doing much else. I won't know for certain until I get there, but I expect that the people running TBC 5-person instances will have dried up just like in 2021, victims of burnout due to following the meta. 

To be honest, that would suit me just fine. I don't need the crowds, and I'm happy doing what I should have done 5 years ago. Live and learn, I guess.

*I'm quite familiar with how FOMO is used to make people play and purchase in-game currency with my limited experience with mobile games. There was a mobile game --whose name escapes me now-- that I played via PC that I simply refused to purchase anything for, but the psychological tricks utilized to try to entice me to purchase currency to buy better items for defense gradually ratcheted up to the point where I simply had to walk away or I knew I'd have broken down and bought stuff just to try to keep up with other players. I'm sure my castle or city is a smoking ruin right now, years later, because of other players who ran roughshod over it in the intervening time. But it was incredibly hard to both walk away and not buy things to improve my standing in the game. And that was.... 2014? 2015? Mobile games have gotten MUCH worse in that regard in the past decade.

**Yes, I had my blogger friends, and you know who you are, but except for the rare direct interaction we didn't play WoW together. Vidyala once offered me a spot in her guild, but as I was quite aware that she'd be making an exception for me as a non-raider I turned it down. I didn't feel it was right for the rules to be bent just because she and I knew each other outside of the game itself. 

Meme Monday: Taking a Break Memes in 2026

All in all, I took over 8 days off from MMOs. It was very much needed, and gave me the chance to recharge a bit. It may sound funny saying so, because a video game ought to be fun, but try telling that to people who are on progression raid teams. Oh, the participants may claim it's fun, but the effort it takes to do raiding and/or Retail-esque Mythic Plus dungeon runs is not a trivial enterprise.

For some people leveling another alt IS
the break. From Facebook's Warcraft Memes group.

Yeah, this is not unheard of in WoW.
From Reddit. (And Twitter.)

To some people, this IS how they get breaks
from MMOs. From meme-arsenal.

It goes without saying that everybody needs a break
from time to time, whether or not Oprah is the provider.
From Twitter and Webengage.

Ha! I'm probably going to be struck by
lightning for this one. From Reddit.

See? Taking a break is a good thing and should
be encouraged. From Memedroid.

Meme Monday: Rainy Memes

This past week has been a wee bit rainy.

It's not monsoon levels of rain --far from it, in fact-- but we got about two months' worth of rain in one week. There was enough rain that I half-expected to see somebody constructing an ark, but nobody was that enterprising of a soul in my neighborhood. We did get a bit of water in the basement, but my redirecting the drainage around the house last Fall apparently was a good enough of a job that the amount of water was pretty minimal compared to last Winter. 

Still, that got me to thinking about rain in gaming. 

A lot of times, rain is a minimal inconvenience; a bit of background flavor. However, if you've ever been caught out in the rain, it can suck if you're not prepared. And then try to imagine being caught in the rain in armor --modern or medieval or ancient, doesn't matter-- and slogging through the mud and the muck to get to wherever you're going, and yeah, rain is a bigger deal than we tend to think it is.

I thought that the beginning of Helm's Deep
was a master class in the impact of rain.
From Reddit and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Therefore, in honor of that past week's worth of rain --thankfully it's sunny as I write this-- here's some memes about rain in RPGs and gaming.

I have to admit it's one of the more unique
ways of introducing everybody in a new
RPG campaign. From Instagram.

It's a D&D meme to have a Cleric bless
the clouds so that they'll rain holy water,
but this takes that meme to its logical
conclusion. From Imgflip via Twitter.

I guess you could say I'm glad I'm not in it.
From Twitter.

And yes, there's always that Tauren joke
about rain. From Twitter.

News and Notes From My Adventures

Alas, Quintalan's hardcore run on the Anniversary servers has come to an end.

RIP...

He made it within a half a level of 20, which exceeded the other two. I knew he was in trouble when I had two Scourge from the Dead Scar on me and I missed 2-3 times in a row on attacks. For the record, the pair of baddies were lower level than me, but when you miss enough times in a row you're going to be in trouble. I'd already used my "Get Out of Jail Free" ability, so when I was at 50% health I faced a decision to either cut and run or heal myself.

I tried healing myself, but I kept getting pushback while casting to the point where I had to try to bolt and run when I was at much lower health. And... that was that.

***

My Enhancement Shaman, Briganaa 2.0, continues to level much quicker than expected. 

That's all relative, of course, because if this were 2021 she'd already be in Outland, but compared to my experiences in the Vanilla version of Operation: Spread the Love she's positively rocketing forward at L36. Part of the reason why she's leveling so quickly is that she has absolutely no problems at all finding groups to get into dungeons with. That doesn't mean I'm leveling using dungeons, but I only consider it when I reach the correct level range for a dungeon and have done enough quests out in the world. Still, being an Enhance Shaman means that tanks love me for the bonuses I can bring to the team, and casters love the Mana Totems I can put down. 

And what's most important is that nobody bitches about whether I'm optimizing myself or not. 

From The O.C. (and Yarn) Remember that show?

***

When I'm not putzing around on the lowbie toons, I've been prepping the L60s for when they go to Outland.

How, you may ask?

Cue Theme from The Andy Griffith Show.

Or this...

Yes, doing quests that I'd left in my Quest Log.

Now, to be fair, I'd have put "Cooking" or "Leveling First Aid" here, but the "Person is Cooking" or "Making Bandages" animations don't look very exciting. (So, they are not here.)

I'm also trying to get all of my professions to their max level --okay, not Enchanting, because if I wanted to do that I'd be stuck in the Old World until November-- but everything else is fair game. Hmm... about Blacksmithing... Uh, yeah, maybe I'll add that to Enchanting.

It works for me, and keeps me from crossing the Dark Portal until I'm good and ready. 

***

As far as Retail goes, Stormwind on Moon Guard is still really empty...

As of last night.

But I did see this little item in my chat window, which amused me to no end...

Considering I was running from Goldshire to Stormwind, I had a good laugh. 

And let's just say that most of the Lion's Pride crowd must be at whatever the new max level is, as they were back. 

No, I didn't take a screenshot this time, and let's just leave it at that. There were... reasons... why I didn't take a screencap.

EtA: Corrected a formatting error.

EtA: Corrected some grammar.

Meme Monday: Min-Max Memes

The concept of min-maxing has been around as long as games have been around. Anybody wanting to get an edge over the competition will inevitably migrate toward getting the best gear and the best process to "win" most often. Sometimes the methodology of min-maxing is a specific strategy that must be adhered to at all costs, or a specific set of selections that provide the optimal output, and sometimes it's all about when your turn happens in a game.

In the Euro-boardgame Puerto Rico, for example, whether or not you'll win a game among expert players is completely decided before the game begins, when it's determined who starts first.

(Yeah, I don't play Puerto Rico for that reason. Why would I want to play a game where the veterans who play it are all whiny about who goes first?)

Of course, you also see min-maxers in tabletop RPGs and MMOs (well, any video game, but I'm most familiar with MMOs these days). So without further ado, here's some min-maxing memes...

I'm pretty sure that my wife would not find
this very amusing... From Twitter.

In case it's not been obvious over the years,
I'd be one of the people holding a sword.
From Reddit.

Absolutely the truth, and it can wreak havoc
in both tabletop RPGs and MMOs. From Reddit.

Yeah, when you encounter min-maxers
out and about who simply don't understand
that you aren't min-maxing.
From Facebooks My DnD group.

But if you keep min-maxing, the arms race has
begun. Happens in both WoW and tabletop
RPGs. From Reddit.

Even I will readily admit that some people
throw around the term "min-maxer" just
to avoid doing the bare minimum to play
their class/character properly. From Reddit.

Meme Monday: Catch-Up Memes

I suppose when I say "Catch-Up", I could go in a ton of different directions. I could be talking about catching up with friends...

From makeameme.org.

Or maybe I should have said "NOT catching up with friends..."

I'm not a fan of the Duck Dynasty show (or the
people), but this meme is pretty much me.
From Pinterest.

I could also have meant catching up to what's going on in an MMO if you've been away for a while...

That's me in pretty much every MMO
these days... From Reddit.

Or when NPCs in game tell you something that
supposedly happened three expacs ago that you weren't
around for and had no idea you'd done.
From Facebook's FFXIV: A Meme Reborn group.

Or worse, things that make your brain freeze.
From swtor-life.

Or maybe, I'm talking about making sure I'm maintaining my health properly and it's been not a very kind winter...

No Cheetos here, honest! But I will admit I haven't
been eating salad as much this past winter as 
I ought to have... From Pleated Jeans.

Meme Monday: Introvert Memes

I am an introvert.

I mean, if you couldn't have figured that out after years of blogging --and enjoying the fact that less than 50 people read the blog regularly-- that I'm an introvert, well, I'm sorry to disappoint you that I'm not an extrovert.

After 30 years of marriage, my wife has figured out that just leaving me to do my thing in the evening, with me occasionally popping into the TV room to see what she's watching, is the way for us to operate. Sure, I play board games with her and I have some occasional RPG games with a game group, but my hobbies tend to not be of the face-to-face variety. 

So, in honor of all of us introverts, here you go...

Yes, this is me at parties. While I can interact with
people well enough, my brain is freaking out the entire
time. From Thisismyrandomlife via The Minds Journal.

This is me to a 'T'. I had an awkward interaction
last week and I simply.cant.stop.thinking.about.it.
From Thunder Dungeon and X.

This is also me. The skills are similar
to that of stalkers, but the result is one
of active avoidance of certain people. It
is not a requirement that we don't get along,
as I also do that so I don't have to interact with
people I do know and like because... reasons.
From X.

Yep. I'm not fond of spontaneity. In my experience,
things get awkward far more often than not. 
The plot of Martin Scorsese's After Hours is
pretty much why I would never go and embrace
spontaneity. From The Minds Journal.

Yes. This. From Sarah Andersen.

Yeah, my introversion is very much on display
when my friends group wants to go and do things,
whether IRL or in WoW. When you dread that
"XXX Invites you to group" pop-up, you might be
an introvert. From The Minds Journal.