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Building on fond memories from playing chess as a child, a burgeoning local woodworker has found a new way to connect with the game

Stephanie Fan and her brother learned chess from their grandfather at a very young age, with an eye not just on the game but also on the prize.

He promised to give us a pony if we could beat him, so we tried really hard to learn the game, she recalled.

They never got a pony, but those special times, and a love of games in general, helped inspire Fan to return to the game as an adult in a new way crafting her own chess sets.

Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Fan worked in the food and beverage industry for nearly a decade before moving to Lexington in 2015. Ive always loved working with my hands, she said. After we moved and I stopped working, I needed something to fill that creative void. After watching a video on YouTube, she decided to give woodworking a go.

I bought a table saw specifically to make a chess set, said Fan, who had always wanted one of her own after growing up with the game. My early attempts were terrible, she admitted, but after several redesigns, and some help from her fellow creators at Kre8Now Makerspace, where she rents studio space, she landed on the winning design: a solid wood chess board with resin inlay and storage for the pieces underneath.

Over the past five years, she has crafted wall clocks, cutting boards and other wooden games, like peg solitaire and topographic puzzles, selling the handmade pieces in her Etsy shop, Atlas & Lily, which is named after her son and daughter. The chess sets, however, are the bread-and-butter of her business, especially since the surge in popularity of The Queens Gambit on Netflix last fall.

I definitely think the show bringing chess to the forefront and the media saying good luck finding chess sets this Christmas has helped my business, she said. I sold out before Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and again before Christmas.

Her geometric chess pieces fit together perfectly in a nesting design inspired by a similar set crafted by designer and modern art aficionado Lanier Graham in the 1960s.

The design and function of the pieces are very much tied together, Fan explained. The rook has straight edges because it moves in a straight line; the bishop has diagonal walls because it moves diagonally; and the knight is L-shaped because it makes L-shaped movements.

The boards themselves are made from regional hardwoods, like walnut, cherry and maple, with Fan sourcing the lumber from a sawmill in Indiana.

I have no interest in using exotic wood because I dont want to ship a piece across the country or the ocean, she explained. There are such beautiful things to use here.

She has even salvaged wood around town from fallen trees that would have otherwise gone into a chipper.

In addition to sourcing her materials in a sustainable way, Fan is committed to offsetting her usage of them. As a small-business partner with the National Forest Foundation, she donates a tree for every sale she makes, and shes currently looking for a charitable partner to help balance out her resin usage.

New chess sets and other wood goods get listed in her Etsy shop, but since she can do a lot of different colors with the resin, Fan likes to work directly with her local customers to bring their custom visions to life. She encourages people to message her on Instagram (@atlas.lily), send her an email or request a custom order through Etsy if they have something particular in mind.

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Out of the Woodwork - http://www.smileypete.com

I dont really like Chess, but I WANT to like Chess. I think the rules and strategies are interesting, and can fully appreciate why its such a highly regarded and enduring game. I just dont have the brain capacity for it. But like I said, I WANT to like it, and the new mobile game Lazy Chess also wants me to like it and is able to do that with some very clever design decisions. There are more variations and unique takes on Chess than you can shake one of those horsey pieces at, but Lazy Chess doesnt really fall into those categories.

This is a straight-up version of Chess, but the crucial change is that the game uses AI to offer you the two best moves each time its your turn to play. It doesnt tell you which move is the BEST move given the situation, but youve got a 50/50 shot at it.

And thats it. Thats the game. It utilizes the highly rated Stockfish Chess engine to determine what to moves to show you, and if you pick the better of the two moves it will let you know, and if you pick the worst of the two moves it will also let you know. Its like having an expert Chess player sitting over your shoulder during a game, telling you what to do, but also letting you make your own decisions and mistakes.

The kicker is that just by observing the two moves offered each turn, and then taking note of when you pick the best or the worst option, you find yourself slowly learning the game at a deeper level and actually improving your own game. And apparently that was the intention of the developers, too. Lazy Chess is actually making me like Chess.

The binary nature of choosing a move each turn makes this feel like if Reigns and Chess had a baby. I only wish Lazy Chess utilized the same Tinder-like swiping gestures that Reigns uses to make it even more natural to play. If youre on the other end of the spectrum from me, and consider yourself a Chess hotshot, I still think youll find plenty to enjoy in Lazy Chess. Theres a bunch of unlockable stuff like new board and piece designs, unlockable difficulty levels so you can ramp things up to your liking, and even the ability to play against other players online.

Lazy Chess is also totally free to download and play with ads and a one-time IAP to unlock an ad-free version of the game. Even if you think you dont like Chess its worth checking out Lazy Chess for free, as not only is it a very good teaching tool, but if you disregard that its a Chess game at all its basically just a really good puzzle game.

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TouchArcade Game of the Week: 'Lazy Chess' - Touch Arcade - Touch Arcade

If youve ever wanted to master the ancient and endlessly enjoyable game of chess, youre far from alone. Whether youve been watching advanced players dominate the board from a young age, or just hopped on the bandwagon thanks to The Queens Gambit, aspiring to be a great chess player is understandably common.

But, far too many would-be chess players give up on their dreams due to the fact that the game can be perceived as too complicated for anyone other than a genius, when the truth is that anyone can become a great chess player with the right instruction and attitude.

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Watching The Queens Gambit? Master the game of chess with this extensive training bundle - KSAT San Antonio

Nearly a month after a pro-Trump mob violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, a clearer picture is emerging of the individuals and groups involved as federal authorities arrest and charge people who allegedly participated in the riot.

Former President Donald Trumps supporters -- 74 million of whom voted to give him a second term in 2020 -- are diverse in background and ideology and come from all corners of the United States, and those who stormed the Capitol represent just a fraction.

But to some experts, the hundreds who took part in the Capitol siege represent some of the most fervent and radical adherents of the Make America Great Again movement and others caught up in the frenzy of the day. They say attempts to unite those extremist elements fell apart after Charlottesville but gained renewed momentum in 2020, with racial unrest, the pandemic and most recently the unfounded controversy over the election.

Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., before a mob stormed the Capitol, breaking windows and clashing with police officers, as congress gathered to certify the election of Joe Biden.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a sociology professor at American University who studies extremism and far-right movements, said that those who stormed the Capitol are a loose coalition of groups from across the far-right spectrum.

These were people who were radicalized and participated in an insurrection, its just that some did so in a very planned way, and I think others ended up being caught up spontaneously in mob rioting," Miller-Idriss said.

For the experts, the most prominent force that unified hard-right adherent, militias and other Trump supporters and whipped them up into a frenzy behind the idea that the election was stolen -- Trump himself.

And Trump, unlike past presidents, gave these disparate groups a national platform unlike any they'd had in modern American history with the instantaneous recognition and feedback of social media.

Trumps false claims about election fraud and his rhetoric post-election urging his supporters to fight back is at the heart of the former presidents Senate impeachment trial, which is set to begin next week. The House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump on Jan. 13 after House Democrats filed an article of impeachment, charging him with "incitement of insurrection."

ABC News reached out to the former presidents legal team but representatives declined to comment.

Larry Rosenthal, chair and lead researcher of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said that the mob was generally made up of two groups: right-wing populists, whom he described as part of Trumps most faithful rally-goers, and right-wing militia groups that represent two overlapping currents of the far-right movement: white nationalism and anti-government.

President Donald Trump is seen on a screen as his supporters cheer during a rally Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Trump supporters gathered in the nation's capital today to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election.

Some of these ideologies and beliefs were on display in far-right insignia scattered among the crowd, which included symbols of the Confederacy, Nazism, white supremacy and anarchy.

And some of those arrested have documented their alleged involvement on social media and some have known ties to far-right groups, or are adherents of disproven conspiracy theories.

In addition to a diverse and loose coalition of groups involved, the members of the mob were also not racially and ethnically homogenous.

Although the majority of rioters at the Stop the Steal rally were white, the Trump mob was not a homogenous group of white nationalists," Cristina Beltrn, a professor at New York University who studies race, ethnicity and American politics, said.

Jacob Chansley and other supporters of President Donald Trump are confronted by U.S. Capitol Police officers outside the Senate Chamber inside the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021.

In fact, one of the organizers of Stop the Steal is far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Ali Alexander, who identifies as Arab and Black. Blacks for Trump signs were spotted in the crowd and some Black and Latino participants are now wanted by the FBI for their alleged involvement in the siege.

In order to understand Trumps support, we must think in terms of multiracial whiteness, Beltrn writes in a Washington Post op-ed: Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.

The motivations of the mob

After weeks of hearing false claims from Trump and his allies that the election was stolen, thousands of the former president's most loyal followers disrupted the certification of the 2020 election results by breaching the U.S. Capitol and clashing with law enforcement in a violent siege that resulted in the death of five people.

Supporters listen as US President Donald Trump speaks on The Ellipse outside of the White House, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

This insistence -- and not just Trumps, but other elected officials insistence on that narrative of disinformation and that false conspiracy about the election has played a huge role in mobilizing these people, Miller-Idriss said.

In fact, chants shouted by rioters and signs spotted in the crowd closely mirrored Trumps own words.

For instance, the rally was named Stop the Steal, a phrase the Trump appeared to revel in and tweeted repeatedly before his account was suspended; shortly after Trump urged supporters to march to the Capitol and fight like hell, rioters shouted fight for Trump as they violently breached law enforcement to enter the building; signs reading take back our country and Trump won the legal vote were spotted among rioters, reflecting language Trump has been using for weeks on Twitter as he repeated his false claims that the election was stolen from him.

Member of a pro-Trump mob exit the Capitol Building after teargas is dispersed inside, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

And finally, after Trump continued to falsely claim that Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to ratify President Joe Biden's 2020 win -- but had declined to do so, chants of Hang Mike Pence were heard among rioters and images casting Pence as a traitor were scattered among the crowd.

(Trump) was continuing to propagate and circulate and disseminate this information about the election in ways that posed an existential threat to them and made them feel that their democracy has been stolen, Miller-Idriss said.

"People move from radicalization into mobilization, to really believing that they are not only empowered to act, but compelled to do so.

People shelter in the House gallery as protesters try to break into the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington.

The leader of the mob

According to Rosenthal, far-right groups that subscribe to white nationalist ideologies have always existed in the United States and since the second era of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and 30s they have generally existed on the fringes of society, but Trump gave them a place in national politics.

Trump supporters gather outside the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington.

Suddenly, in 2015 at the level of presidential politics, somebody is talking their language, he added, pointing to Trump's anti-immigrant and racially charged rhetoric.

During his presidency, Trump frequently failed to condemn white supremacists and far-right groups espousing hateful and disproven conspiracy theories. He also often galvanized their causes.

The Stop the Steal movement energized some of the same elements of the far-right movement in the U.S. that shaped the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville when hundreds of so-called alt-right groups took to the streets to violently protest the removal of Confederate monuments.

The Unite the Right [movement] failed. It did not create such a unified militia and the groups that put it together started falling apart among themselves the alt-right kind of went into decline, but 2020 resurrected things, Rosenthal said.

This past year, anti-lockdown and anti-mask demonstrations amid the COVID-19 pandemic inflamed the anti-government right-wing militia groups, while the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted over the summer following the police killing of George Floyd activated the white nationalist side of the far-right movement, Rosenthal added.

Supporters of President Donald Trump gather in the rain for a rally at Freedom Plaza, Jan. 5, 2021, in Washington, D.C., the day before a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol following a rally with Trump.

And Trump, who was outspoken on both issues, elevated these positions to the national stage, experts said.

As president, Trump repeatedly downplayed the pandemic, refused to implement a nationwide mask mandate, mostly refused to wear a mask himself and his administration frequently flouted federal safety guidelines meant to curb the crisis.

Meanwhile, during his 2020 campaign, Trump cast himself as the law and order candidate, slammed the Black Lives Matter movement, dismissed concerns surrounding systemic racism and police brutality and in a message to voters, he claimed that if he is not re-elected, crime and riots will overtake the suburbs.

President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a rally Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington D.C.

During his final weeks in office, the coalition of far-right groups again found a common cause around the baseless cause that the election had been stolen or rigged.

The white nationalist and anti-government currents compounded in "Stop the Steal," along with an important element of "fascist mobilizations," Rosenthal said: "A devotion to a singular leader who can command their attention.

ABC News' Alexander Mallin and John Santucci contributed to this report.

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Anatomy of the pro-Trump mob: How the former president's rhetoric galvanized a far-right coalition - ABC News

Like Emma, Oylers narrator teeters on the border between likable and loathsome and possesses enormous reserves of intellectual and libidinal energy in search of an outlet. Emma is handsome, clever and rich; Oylers narrator is also those things, albeit in somewhat lesser form. And perhaps most significantly, she too is fumbling, a little blindly, around the problem of her privilege, which she is aware of but not yet existentially troubled by.

In the wake of the election, she observes that for her cohort, the incoming administration would not affect them particularly sweepingly and that in fact, being a white woman living in Brooklyn began to feel, very briefly, less repugnant; the white women living in Brooklyn, in the end, were ultimately just annoying, point-missing and distracting, not the biggest problem.

A somewhat retrograde cynic, a toxic presence, the narrator armors herself in wit, continually hedging her position and thus her engagement with the political tumult around her. She hesitates to go to the Womens March not because I was ideologically opposed to the idea necessarily but because it seemed there would be a lot of pink, which in a feminist context signaled to me a lack of rigor. Later, she refers to her story as a typical searching bourgeois-white-person narrative.

But this cynicism blunts her ability to navigate the world, and her own emotions, with catastrophic results. Her friends tell her shes overcompensating for my despair with snark; I didnt have to be so clever all the time. What was the point of making jokes, she wonders, frustrated and teary. The narrator repeatedly gestures at the limitations of her irony, without necessarily being able to see beyond it.

That sense of entrapment of not knowing how to relate to the world is central to the novel. Oyler is such a funny writer that it can be easy to overlook the fact that the underlying tone of her book is extreme disquiet. Irony provides no protection from unease, but is itself a source of it. It becomes clear why the novel takes place in the days after the 2016 election. This period brought the rapid ascent of the alt-right, the proliferation of its language and symbols. Notably, that language was one of plausible deniability, hate expressed under the cover of irony.

At first glance, that particular form of toxic irony seems miles away from the lacerating humor and thrusting intellect of our narrator. But cynicism leaves her vulnerable to misapprehending the world and the people in it including her very online, conspiracy theorist boyfriend. The reader grasps much earlier than she does not only the final layer of Felixs betrayals, but also the grim possibility that she fell in love with Felix not despite his deceptions but because of them that there is an uncomfortable alliance between her lazy nihilism and his reactionary online persona.

How do we relate to irony and cynicism in this new age of the alt-right? Stylish, despairing and very funny, Fake Accounts doesnt necessarily provide an answer to this question. But it adroitly maps the dwindling gap between the individual and the world. However much time the narrator spends alone, in her head and online, she is formed by what is happening outside. Eventually, the realization hits: The entire time, the call has been coming from inside the house.

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Fake Accounts Examines the Alluring Trap of Our Online Personas - The New York Times