Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend
Four reasonable explanations, one honest one, and the honest one takes the whole circle.
Five explanations, plotted honestly. The four flattering ones are slivers; the fifth, a level 80 Paladin, takes everything that is left.
Five reasons are offered. I am only average looking but have a fun personality. I am shy around girls but great once I get to know them. I do not hang out with the popular crowd but have fun, close friends. I cannot afford to buy her nice things but am willing to put in time and effort. And: I am a level 80 Paladin.
The first four are slivers. The fifth is the rest of the circle.
The shape of an honest self-assessment
Every one of the four thin slices is built the same way, and the construction is the point. A mild deficiency, then a conjunction, then a compensating virtue. Average looking but fun. Shy but great later. Not popular but close friends. Poor but willing. Each is a complete little argument for why the deficiency does not count.
The fifth slice has no “but”. It is a flat statement of fact with no compensating clause attached, and the chart gives it everything.
That structural contrast is what makes the plate work as a chart rather than as a list. In a bulleted list all five would carry equal weight and the last one would just be the funniest. Plotted as areas, the four excuses are visibly rounding errors, and the reader does the arithmetic before reading the labels: one thing is going on here, and it is not the personality.
The level 80 detail also dates the plate precisely. World of Warcraft’s cap sat at 80 from November 2008 until December 2010, so in August 2009 the phrase meant a character played to the current ceiling. It is not a joke about playing games. It is a joke about how many hours are in the pie.
Plotting the excuses as areas is what exposes them as the rounding errors they are, and the same treatment does real work on numbers that matter: the house-edge comparison is a bar chart because 1.41 per cent and 5.26 per cent read as neighbours in a sentence and as opposites on a scale.
Where it travelled
This is the plate in the archive with the strangest onward life, and most of it happened in Russian.
The chart was reproduced widely enough in Russia to acquire a name of its own, attached to the phrase “level 80 elf”. Lurkmore, the Russian encyclopaedia of internet culture, documented the meme and its number, and its entry contains a correction that matters here: the original chart was not about elves at all, but about a specific class, the paladin. Somewhere in the crossing, the class changed, the elf version stuck, and the derivative outgrew the source. Memepedia repeats the same correction in its entry on memetic numbers, filed between 1337 and other numerals that mean something online.
In English it stayed closer to home. Geeks Are Sexy reposted it as a pie chart, crediting GraphJam via The Daily What. It was pasted into a jokes thread on the Contractor UK bulletin board, into an IRC channel for a World of Warcraft addon project, where the log for 5 September 2009 preserves the bare URL, and onto the Christian Gamers Alliance under the heading “Could not resist”. A French gaming guild posted it as “pourquoi ils n’ont pas de petite amies”.
The pattern is consistent: it spread through the population it was describing, which is the mark of a self-deprecating joke landing rather than an insult.
What the plate is worth now
The specific reference has aged into history. Level 80 is long gone as a cap, and the class that carried the joke was replaced by an elf in the version most people outside the English-speaking web actually saw.
What has not aged is the construction: four excuses with escape clauses, one statement without, and an area encoding that settles the matter before you finish reading. Thirteen domains still link here, in three languages, mostly from forums where somebody was making the same admission about themselves.