No Hunk-o'-Junk Here

For this month's Flickr Favorite post, I had a number of good choices. One choice was another in the series of J-L. Mazieres chess images last seen in More Lessons in Art Appreciation (April 2021). The new Mazieres Flickr page is Lucas de Leyde [aka van Leyden]. 1489-1533. Leyden Jeu d'échecs. (flickr.com), where the title continues,

Berlin Gemaldegalerie. The game of chess symbolizes both the struggle for power and the war of the sexes.

The choice I finally made, shown here, is another of those AI generated chess images of which I'm so fond. When I first saw it, I thought it might even be a photo of a real chess set.

victorian era technical illustration of steampunk style chess pieces... © Flickr user Hongse sishen under Creative Commons.

The full title is:-

victorian era technical illustration of steampunk style chess pieces on intricate chess board with complex brass and ivory fittings with exotic colorful mineral crystals, measurement dials and meters [...]

That reads very much like a prompt for an AI generator. It was continued in the description with:-

[...], glass magnifying lenses emitting ethereal light & electrical sparks --ar 16:9 --style raw --v 6.0 @Jerry

The Flickr user's name looked to be written in Chinese characters. Google confirmed it to be 'Chinese (Traditional)', then transliterated it to 'Hongse sishen', translated as 'red death'. Note the word 'death' is also a component of the photographer's name in the image's URL.

The last time we saw 'steampunk' on this blog was Hunk-o'-Junk Chess (January 2016; 'Before: Random Pipe Fittings • After: Steampunk Chess Set'). As far as I can tell, steampunk and AI are polar opposites.