This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
The thing that’s like the highlight of my day [right now] is Internet chatting, like the old days. My partner
Michael DeForge, who is a cartoonist and is isolating with me, he’s running a kind of movie night where we just play shorts and stuff over Twitch, and it’s got a chat room. I haven’t really chatted in that way for many, many years, but it [reminds] me of the first time I fell in love with the Internet when I was 14. That was why it was so exciting, [the] chat rooms. It’s kind of funny to be revisiting chat rooms with people that I know in real life. We’re friends getting together to have a communal experience, [and] we talk about what food we ate or the weather. A friend of mine streamed some [videos] of Olympic figure skating from the last Olympics, and we’ll just chat over that. It’s been a sanity saver.
There will be 30 or 40 people to a room, but only a few of us chat. It’s a little muscle that you kind of forgot about, [knowing] how the chat flows. There’s a surfing aspect to it—it’s going by so fast and you’re just trying to catch a wave and hot dog a bit and puncture through. It’s quippy and less calculated, which is nice because it’s just a flow and you can add to it. There’s something competitive about it, which I don’t think is the same on Instagram or Twitter. This is definitely a sort of Internet moment, in addition to other moments. I feel like we’re all learning to move through digital space and some of us are more comfortable with that than others.
I also signed onto to do another book and I’ve been quilting and also been soliciting requests from people on my Instagram, like, what should I put on this thing? [Laughs] I just know I’m the type of person that needs to move their hands a lot. I’m not a good reader, I can’t just sit for four hours and read a book even if I like the book. I need to be making something, or moving my hands, or creating.
