I don't think I come across as an alien. For example, I'm very deeply involved in my local Quaker meeting, and I don't think any of that is particularly different than others. That said, I can nerd out extremely deeply into a problem, to a point where I've noticed other people's eyes glaze over. Case in point, I've become interested in memory models for GPUs, and while most people in the field would be content to leave it there, I've actually dug into the Alloy code for the formalization of the Vulkan memory model (and found some issues along the way). I'd estimate there are probably less than two dozen other people in the world who have dug that deep, and, thinking about it now, I can see a pretty direct line to what child-prodigy-me would do in a similar situation.