iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 8h

This is more a general complaint of how Celtic Woman as a musical collective would be more aptly called Irish Woman, but I agree! Nothing wrong with the Irish style as well, I quite like the rendition.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 8h

Celtic Woman released a cover of Jolene, but it's all Irish singers and in Irish style. Dolly Parton had Welsh heritage, so it would have been arguably more appropriate to throw some triple harp and crwth and pibgorn in there and have Welsh singers do it.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 16h

I figured out how to light the pilot light in my 60 year old boiler. Praise Mathonwy, the house is warm again!

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 16h

Getting kicked out of the Karaite group for talking about polytheism in the Torah and suggesting that a plain reading of the Torah requires you to accept that Yahweh is an interloper deity who usurped El.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 17h

Oh, it doesn't wear off for me! Other people are just less interested in hearing about apples.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I did a double take because I independently came up with "bamboo raccoon" as a moniker for panda bears because I thought calling raccoons "trash pandas" was mean and uncalled for. Great minds think alike!

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The moral of the story is not that American and European work culture is different, but that my colleagues were completely inept at doing any kind of standard inter-office communication. Most people who make more money than you are borderline incompetent. Always remember that.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Turns out that management didn't understand time zones very well, or the fact that Europeans have lots of time off and don't answer off hours, etc. Also, they hadn't actually tried just emailing the appropriate people with completed, competent work order documents.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

At one of my old jobs I was the "European whisperer". We had a lot of contracts in Germany and Switzerland and everyone hated dealing with them, so they told me to give it a try. Within a week I had everything sorted that they were working on for 6 months.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I saw a YouTube video that said, "All about the Nordic languages," and there was a flag of Estonia included with all the others. Gonnae go out on a limb and assume the person who made the video is Estonian lol

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Sometimes I wish I were a practising Catholic if only so I can use all of my mother's adorable oaths. "Jesus wept." "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" "Give me strength." "Mother of God!"

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I thought it'd skip me because I had a cold in June and I figured it was the same thing going around, but I guess not! A third of my class was out two weeks ago. A different third last week. I figured it'd come around to me, but I was hoping I was going to get lucky!

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Oh well, finally caught that cold going around campus!

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I told her that she should just take a few more days off and visit Edinburgh and Glasgow (taking the train between them) if she wants to dip her toes into Scottish tourism and make her worth the cost of her flight.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I live back and forth between New England and the Inverness area. I've shown my work colleagues too many pictures of the other place and now they're getting it in their head to visit, which is great, but they need more than two days!

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Especially with the dual carriage way construction on the A9, you'll never get there in a hired car if you're landing in Glasgow or Edinburgh. You'd have to turn back to catch your flight before you'd even arrive, I reckon.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

A colleague of mine wants to take a weekend trip to Scotland and wants to go to Inverness and I keep insisting that this isn't going to be possible. She'd get all of 3 hours in Inverness before she'd have to start travelling back to Boston, if she's lucky.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Actually, I find it hard to believe someone translated it into Cornish but not Manx. I'm sure I'm just not finding it.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I somehow own a copy of The Hobbit in Irish, (Scottish) Gaelic, and Welsh now. Apparently, it's available in every Celtic language but Manx. Should I get a Cornish copy as well? Or should I just give up on Cornish? I've had bad experiences lol

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Prynu Llyfrau Newydd: Yr Hobyd (yn Gymraeg) gan JRR Tolkien a Bronwen gan Beriah Gwynfe Evans. New book haul: The Hobbit (in Welsh) by J.R.R. Tolkien and Bronwen by Beriah Gwynfe Evans.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Remember when we ate an entire Cerverino's pizza together in Edinburgh?

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

People in technocratic cults in my mentions talking about AI as "a tool" for making art. Because what writers were asking for was for ChatGPT to tell them synonyms for a word instead of using a thesaurus, all so corporations can replace them and we can enjoy rolling brownouts. Cult behaviour.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

You're having a separate conversation from the one I'm having, so whatever, mate. Cheers!

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

But yeah, AI is not the wave of the future. It's a cynical tool to make fake art without the direct input of actual artists so that corporations don't have to pay the artists themselves. Just like my proverbial car welding machine example.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

As for the separate issue of the legality of borrowing music to make other music, I'm honestly not particularly interested in that conversation, though I reckon that if we force people to credit others, we ought to force AI machines to display the works they gleaned from for their simulacra.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

"My composer simulacrum machine made a good symphony!" Yeah, the machine that welded my car together did a good job too, but I don't give it credit as a great craftsman LOL

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

History will probably more than likely treat AI like a CD player. A CD player is not a live band, it's a machine that plays a recording. We don't give it credit for producing the sounds of music. People are going to feel pretty silly realising they humanised a machine and called it an artist lol

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Dana and I were just talking about it! Her mum was from, like, 30 minutes away from my hometown. I actually never knew that before!

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Every year, it's the same apple harvest. On the rare occasion where I can tell you about a variety that is new to me, I will, or just share a good haul, but my followers aren't into apples anymore. They're into feeling doomed and talking about it.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

2010s was peak Mathonwy the Apple Maiden era. I know I hardly talk about apples these days. Don't get me wrong, I still have 15 heirloom varieties of apples on my kitchen table right now, I'm just talking about it less because, eh, you've heard it all from me before already.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Sorry, most of us aren't in your bizarre little cult of worshipping inanimate objects and binary code. We have relationships with other people to attend to.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

They build robots that weld things on an assembly line, yet I've never thought to be impressed at a robot welder in the same way I appreciate the craftsmanship of a good human welder. So don't ask me to be impressed by software that can imitate the process of composing music. It's not a composer.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Yeah, we have this legal apparatus in place now, and AI is trying to circumvent it. You're right to say that musicians by and large have not in anyway licensed their works for this nor agreed to their works being used to train AI, and so it is very much unethical and, arguably, illegal.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The problem with AI is that it's a simulacrum of music-making rather than the human activity of music-making itself. The fact that it trains on the music of others without compensating them is it's own economic problem, but it's not what makes it "fake music". It's the simulacrum aspect.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

At no point did anyone suggest that this wasn't "real music" because it borrowed and built off of pre-existing musical materials. This music was seen as a commons that everyone could draw from, so it wasn't *stealing*. That's why sampling isn't felt as stealing either: we have a tradition of this.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I take issue with the OP's framing of quodlibet and quotation in music because musical borrowings have existed in Western music since the Middle Ages. The first polyphony was basically just taking a cantus firmus (a song already written) and adding more parts to it.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Calvinism ruined this country from its inception. The existence of working class people is seen as a testament to their moral failings, their predestined damnation made manifest. Their work is meant to be penance. The wealthy elect get to sit, be leisurely, be indolent, and make fortunes doing it.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Puritan American culture equates wage work with forced suffering. It's not work unless you suffer. That's why you can't joke with colleagues at these jobs, or listen to your own music, or sit when operating a till, or stand up to unreasonable customers, etc. You're meant to eat the dung sandwich.

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I also doubt that a customer complained. I think that was an excuse. Even if it were true, it's pretty easy to tell said customer, "Hey, fool, do you see that that lady has a cane and a wrapped-up foot? And she came to work anyway to serve you? Get over yourself and leave the store."

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This reminds me of working retail post-cancer treatment. Bad neuropathy in extremities, broke a toe from lack of feeling it. One day, I was told by management that I couldn't sit when working the till anymore because a customer complained. I refused to stand. Dared them to fire me. (They didn't.)

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Beth am gynnau tân fel y tân yn ein calonnau?

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I made my spooky name! (Gravenstein is an apple variety, and a very Halloweeny name.)

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I saw the photo before reading your post and did the exact same thing. In fact, I said out loud, "WHAT'S IN THE BOOOOOOX!" 😆

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Mathonwy, Lady Gravenstein 🍏🎃 @mathonwy.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Don't worry, I won't force you to work on my orchard growing the Golden Apples of Immortality for me in lieu of whatever horrible fate you might have met instead. *nervous laughter* No, no, I wouldn't do that. You're my devoted followers! Eternally devoted. Forever...

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