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Such bet are usually bad ones, which is why so many massive casino-resorts have been built on Las Vegas Boulevard. But it doesn't mean the organizers are wrong. They're counting on the minimum of $1 million in guaranteed name, image and likeness money that will go to each of the eight teams competing in the neutral-site tournament that begins Tuesday will create a precedent for other such events. EverWonder Studios CEO Ian Orefice, who co-founded Players with former AND1 CEO Seth Berger, compared this event to last year's inaugural NBA In-Season Tournament that played its semifinals and final in Las Vegas by saying it "did really well to reinvigorate the fan base at the beginning of the year." "We're excited that we're able to really change the paradigm in college basketball on the economics," Orefice said. "But for us, it's about the long term. How do we use the momentum that is launching with the 2024 Players Era Festival and be the catalyst not to change one event, but to change college basketball for the future." Orefice and Berger didn't disclose financial details, but said the event will come close to breaking even this year and that revenue is in eight figures. Orefice said the bulk of the revenue will come from relationships with MGM, TNT Sports and Publicis Sport & Entertainment as well as sponsors that will be announced later. Both organizers said they are so bullish on the tournament's prospects that they already are planning ahead. Money made from this year's event, Orefice said, goes right back into the company. "We're really in this for the long haul," Orefice said. "So we're not looking at it on a one-year basis." Rick Giles is president of the Gazelle Group, which also operates several similar events, including the College Basketball Invitational. He was skeptical the financial numbers would work. Giles said in addition to more than $8 million going to the players, there were other expenses such as the guarantees to the teams. He said he didn't know if the tournament would make up the difference with ticket sales, broadcast rights and sponsorship money. The top bowl of the MGM Grand Garden Arena will be curtained off. "The math is highly challenging," Giles said. "Attendance and ticket revenues are not going to come anywhere close to covering that. They haven't announced any sponsors that I'm aware of. So it all sort of rests with their media deal with Turner and how much capital they want to commit to it to get these players paid." David Carter, a University of Southern California adjunct professor who also runs the Sports Business Group consultancy, said even if the Players isn't a financial success this year, the question is whether there will be enough interest to move forward. "If there is bandwidth for another tournament and if the TV or the streaming ratings are going to be there and people are going to want to attend and companies are going to want to sponsor, then, yeah, it's probably going to work," Carter said. "But it may take them time to gain that traction." Both founders said they initially were met with skepticism about putting together such an event, especially from teams they were interested in inviting. Houston was the first school to commit, first offering an oral pledge early in the year and then signing a contract in April. That created momentum for others to join, and including the No. 6 Cougars, half the field is ranked. "We have the relationships to operate a great event," Berger said. "We had to get coaches over those hurdles, and once they knew that we were real, schools got on board really quickly." The founders worked with the NCAA to make sure the tournament abided by that organization's rules, so players must appear at ancillary events in order to receive NIL money. Strict pay for play is not allowed, though there are incentives for performance. The champion, for example, will receive $1.5 million in NIL money. Now the pressure is on to pull off the event and not create the kind of headlines that can dog it for years to come. "I think everybody in the marketplace is watching what's going to happen (this) week and, more importantly, what happens afterwards," Giles said. "Do the players get paid on a timely basis? And if they do, that means that Turner or somebody has paid way more than the market dictates? And the question will be: Can that continue?" CREIGHTON: P oint guard Steven Ashworth likely won’t play in the No. 21 Bluejays’ game against San Diego State in the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas. Ashworth sprained his right ankle late in a loss to Nebraska on Friday and coach Greg McDermott said afterward he didn’t know how long he would be out.Shareholders of ( ) have enjoyed an impressive 47% return this year. That comes in addition to a solid dividend, which just saw another hike last quarter. Headquartered in New Orleans, Entergy provides electric power utilities to 3 million customers across Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas. The impressive returns this year are driven by a surge in data-center demand to supply the power needs of artificial intelligence. This growth has sparked renewed excitement in the once sleepy utility sector. According to McKinsey & Co., data center energy consumption in the U.S. is projected to grow from about 4% of total energy demand today to 11%-12% by 2030. Entergy has already seen solid earnings growth, which is only set to accelerate in the longer term. The company expects 8%-9% earnings growth post 2025. Dividend Stock And Data Centers These growth expectations are not just speculation. Earlier this month, Facebook's parent company, ( ), announced plans to invest $10 billion in what will be its largest data center, in Louisiana. To power the plant, Entergy plans to bring . While Entergy's annualized 3.2% dividend yield is much higher than the S&P 500 average of 1.2%, it is lower than most companies profiled in IBD's Income Investor column. Still, the story remains compelling due to steady dividend growth. In November, the company by 6%, to $1.20 per share. If Entergy meets its growth projections, investors can likely expect continued, sizable dividend increases. Given the monopolistic characteristics of the utility market, this seems like a strong bet. Additionally, the company is in a solid fiscal position, with its debt rated at investment-grade (BBB+) by S&P Global. However, there is some uncertainty about where future data center growth will occur. And if the industry doesn't meet long-term expectations, Entergy's current valuation could be called into question. Shares of Entergy are currently finding support at their , with an entry point around 73.50. This is the first buy area since the dividend stock cleared a base in August, according to .

-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email “Why do you draw?” A seemingly innocuous question that in truth carries immense weight. It’s the kind of question that you can brush off with a casual wave of the hand, or it can leave you speechless, unable to even find the words. Art isn’t numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s life itself. In “Look Back,” the film based on Tatsuki Fujimoto’s one-shot manga, two teenage girls bond over their love of creating manga. Fujino handles the characters and story, while Kyomoto takes care of the background art. They make a powerful team. When Kyomoto asks Fujino why she draws, we don’t get an explanation. We don’t need it. We’ve seen it. Every moment the pair shares with each other is why. Seasons change outside Fujino’s window as she and Kyomoto work on their first manga together. The duo quietly scribbles away, creating in the presence of one another, as pages of manuscript pile up. We see that life and art are intimately linked. That creation is born out of the wonder, the mystery and of course, the tragedy of life. This is not a review of “Look Back.” Enough beautiful words have already been said about the film, and it is most certainly one that any fan of anime, manga, cinema or art in general should see. But it is that simple-but-not question, “Why do you draw?” asked by Kyomoto to Fujino, that echoed in my head, clanging and clattering in the space between my ears in the days and weeks after I saw “Look Back.” I think it struck a chord because it increasingly feels like the creative process, and deeper and more troubling than that, humanity itself, is under attack . Related The 12 biggest moments in animation in 2023 There is a contingent of craven capitalists who have slowly turned the entertainment industry into just another financial market. Moving into senior positions at major studios in film, television and video games, these ghouls seek only to maximize profit. The art at the center of these industries is, to many of these bigwigs, a means to an end. That end being stock prices and shareholder satisfaction. It’s why we got “ Inside Out 2” and “ Moana 2” this year. Unnecessary sequels that a bunch of suits knew would rake in the dough. Although talented people worked on both, when art is kept within the confines of a giant, soulless corporation, art (and the people creating it) is held captive by the profit motive. Money becomes the mantra. When someone’s life’s work, their passion, their expression of creativity, is diminished to merely being seen as content, as numbers on an earnings report, it is an attack on art. This year, “Coyote vs. Acme” was shelved and seems destined to become lost media , buried before even being given a chance for audiences to see it. The hard work of hundreds of people, a mere tax write-off under the mighty pen of Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav . One of my favorite shows from last year , “Scavengers Reign,” was unable to avoid the axe. Despite winning an Emmy (for background design) and being nominated for outstanding animated program, the show didn’t bring in the viewer hours so it was unceremoniously thrown on the heap. Critical acclaim or simply letting art exist in the world and be received by the people (with no concern for the size of the audience) aren’t things that Zaslav and his ilk consider. Imagine if “Mad Men” or "The Sopranos" was cut after its first season because target demos, algorithm data and KPIs just didn’t support renewal. In 2024, the only concern is that the numbers look good, so that CEOs can line their pockets with millions in compensation. And if recent reaction to UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s murder is anything to go by, the people are getting a little fed up with the unfettered greed of the C-suite. Art isn’t numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s life itself. We need your help to stay independent Subscribe today to support Salon's progressive journalism “Look Back” implores the viewer to see how art and life are intertwined. Every adventure that Fujino and Kyomoto go on becomes the inspiration for another manga. They visit the ocean, and that leads to the duo writing “The Sea Cities.” Looking for bugs in summer turns into “The Cicada Humans.” A trip to the aquarium yields “The Man Who Ate the Crab.” The pair experiences life, and their art echoes those experiences. Reverberating through the creative process, those echoes twist and distort just enough to give the art they produce a fantastical fiction, but at its core, their art is quite literally their lives. The works of Dickens capture Victorian London so well because he lived it; he worked in the warehouses, and his worldview was shaped by these formative experiences. Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto explored forests and hunted for bugs as a child, and wanted to recreate that feeling in a video game, eventually leading to the creation of “The Legend of Zelda.” Hayao Miyazaki ’s works are tinged with autobiographical moments, such as his mother’s hospitalization with tuberculosis — an element of both “My Neighbor Totoro” and “The Wind Rises” — or his father building rudders for fighter planes during World War II, a piece of his own history we see alluded to in the Oscar-winning “The Boy and The Heron.” And for Miyazaki in particular, art and life are nearly one and the same as we come to learn in this year’s documentary that sneakily landed on Max this summer, “Hayao Miyazaki and The Heron.” The documentary chronicles the entire production timeline for “The Boy and The Heron,” starting with Miyazaki announcing his retirement in 2013 through to the film’s Oscar win this year. The iconic director has been the subject of a few documentaries in the past, but in those, Miyazaki always remained guarded, never really letting the viewer understand the man we have so endlessly mythologized. His politics are evident in the films he has made over the past 40 years, but what motivates this man, now nearly 84 years old, to create the worlds of “Nausicaa,” “Castle in the Sky” or the Great Uncle’s tower in “The Boy and The Heron”? Much like Fujino in “Look Back,” the answer seems to be human connection. Throughout “Hayao Miyazaki and The Heron” there is an urgency to Miyazaki’s work. People close to him are passing away; there is guilt and there is sadness. “Why am I still here? Why am I the one that lived?” he wonders aloud. Miyazaki “reeks of death” like Mahito the titular boy of the film. But he storyboards furiously, creating characters based on the people he has lost. Michiyo Yasuda, the color designer on Miyazaki’s films at Studio Ghibli, passed away in 2016, but she appears in the documentary’s footage like a ghost, a vision of the past that haunts the present day Miyazaki. She was the one who told him to make another film, and he felt a sense of obligation to do it. He creates Kiriko in “The Boy and The Heron” based on Yasuda. But no one looms larger than Isao Takahata, Studio Ghibli co-founder and director, who passed away in 2018. And it's in their relationship where it becomes clear that nearly everything Miyazaki has ever made has been driven by the man he affectionately calls Pak-san. Pak-san, Pak-san, Pak-san. A clap of thunder rumbles in the distance while on a walk. “That’s Pak-san.” When Miyazaki is asked if he ever dreams, he responds “Only about Pak-san.” A missing eraser is Pak-san playing a trick on him. Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki says that “Miyazaki idolized Takahata, but it was always one-sided.” The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli) Miyazaki agonizes over the character of the Great Uncle who has built the fantastical world of the tower in “The Boy and The Heron.” The character is Pak-san. In this one-sided relationship, made even more so by the divide between the living and the dead, Miyazaki is determined to show the world who Takahata was. He wants people to know what this man meant to him. The man who was his idol, his rival, his friend. The documentary cuts to a particularly powerful quote from Takahata back in the ‘80s, talking about Miyazaki, where he says, “I’d like to see him make all kinds of films. There are things he hasn’t shown me. I hope to see them one day.” The interview cuts to a wide shot showing Miyazaki beside him with a beaming smile, “Really?” he asks Takahata gleefully. This is how art comes to be. For Miyazaki. For Fujino in “Look Back.” It is driven by the desire for human connection, by wanting to express one’s self to someone, to honor someone who has passed to ensure that they are remembered. Which is why when AI software is used to generate an image , or write a story, it is so revolting . You can’t tell AI to create the Great Uncle. You can’t tell it to create an old man who kinda looks like a wizard who was the whole world to me and everything I did was for him and all I wanted was for him to see my films and enjoy them and I want people to know that. It can’t convey that level of emotional depth, or any emotional depth. AI is mere facsimile (and poorly done at that), and yet, it has been integrated into nearly every piece of technology creating nothing but slop. Related "It's going to destroy jobs": When an AI image won a photo contest, its human refused the award AI is a threat to art, a threat to culture, a threat to humanity itself. How far are we willing to go to utterly dehumanize ourselves? Late capitalism is already turning us away from one another, with the convenience of technology isolating us, keeping us from making a connection to someone. Companies like Disney are fully on board with AI , where acting in a “responsible way” means, “How much can we get away with and not pay people for?” So don’t be surprised when a round of layoffs is announced, so more money can be funneled up to executives at the top. Companies like X are training their AI by using (read: stealing) art uploaded to the platform by artists. And it would be easy to write a whole thesis on how the demands of AI usage and development is causing emissions at companies like Microsoft to rise at a staggering rate, decimating any plans of reaching previously set carbon-neutrality goals. This AI slop, this soulless mimicry of human life, is accelerating the planet’s demise. AI is anti-human in all facets. How far are we willing to go to utterly dehumanize ourselves? 2024 felt like a year where, more than ever before, art was under attack. From corporate fat cats cutting jobs to AI software to humanities programs getting slashed in higher education, the assault on engaging with our world, and on engaging with art is in full effect. It is deeply distressing. But 2024 also produced a film that tells us why art needs to exist, why it is so special, and what it means to be human. “Look Back” yells from the rooftops that art is tough, it is work, but the reward is it connects us like nothing else can. Look Back (Tatsuki Fujimoto/Shueisha Art is beautiful because of the humanity it contains within it. There is energy in a work of art that cannot be quantified, cannot be calculated, cannot be replicated by a machine. It reflects us, it connects us, it bears all of our tragedy, all of our joy. I’m hardly the best writer out here. There are people who write much more eloquently than I do. I admire these writers greatly. But I just want to connect. I want someone to read my words. Someone. Anyone. Even if it just ends up being my family or friends. I have entire worlds inside my head that I want others to experience the way I see them in my mind’s eye. No AI program can scrape these worlds accurately out of my head. There are so many thoughts and ideas in here that I want to share. I hope that my words make someone feel something. I just have to do the work to get them onto the page. That, to me, is something very worth the effort. Art is what makes us human, so why would we want a robot to do it for us? I just want to connect. To prove that I’m alive. I’m not a machine. Read more about this topic The ethics of eating monsters "The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim" is another barrel-scraping twist on Tolkien "Blue Eye Samurai" addresses multiracial shame, "to be ostracized from both sides," in Edo-era Japan "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" is beyond subtitles — and the white gaze By Michael Lee Michael Lee is a writer who might take anime and video games a little too seriously. For more musings on animation, fandom and game worlds, follow him on X @kousatender . MORE FROM Michael Lee Related Topics ------------------------------------------ Ai Animation Anime Artificial Intelligence Best Of 2024 Commentary Hayao Miyazaki Look Back The Bird And The Heron Related Articles Advertisement:

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