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Apple TV+ today unveiled the season two trailer for Swagger, the acclaimed and emotional sports drama helmed by creator, showrunner and director Reggie Rock Bythewood. The Apple Original series will debut with the first episode on Friday, June 23, 2023, followed by one new episode weekly every Friday through August 11 on Apple TV+. Inspired by NBA superstar Kevin Durant’s experiences, Swagger explores the world of youth basketball, and the players, their families and coaches who walk the fine line between dreams and ambition, and opportunism and corruption. Off the court, the show reveals what it’s like to grow up in America. Viewers can catch up on season one of Swagger, now streaming globally on Apple TV+.
A 2023 Tribeca Film Festival selection, Swagger season two is set to premiere at the festival on Saturday, June 17 with Bythewood and cast in attendance. The series is one of ten TV premieres set for this year’s festival, which is known for its diversity and celebration of storytelling.
In season two, we meet the man-children Jace, Phil, Nick, Musa, Drew and Royale as they are entering their senior year of high school. All but Phil will be attending Cedar Cove Prep; a predominantly White institution where wealthy board members control the entire operation from the hiring of faculty to the enrollment of students. It is a school of power and influence. For all of their academic success, their basketball program has not been competitive until Emory Lawson, the athletic director, managed to acquire the Swagger players. Almost overnight, Cedar Cove’s basketball program becomes elite, attracting the attention of Alonzo Powers from Gladiator Sneakers.
Games are attended by top college scouts from the nation and are live-streamed for thousands of fans. With winning comes scrutiny and the players find themselves under a microscope as they vie for a national high school championship. Everything is going right in the life of Jace Carson and his family. Jenna is renting a house in a residential neighborhood and her cosmetic sales business is booming. Then, a video surfaces that threatens to destroy it all. It is surveillance footage of Coach Warwick, Crystal’s former coach, being beat down in an alley. The attackers are masked but Coach Warwick believes he has found evidence proving the Swagger players were involved. As this speculation reaches the public eye and social media, the bond of brotherhood the players have built is tested. Their once promising futures are in jeopardy.
Swagger stars O’Shea Jackson Jr., Isaiah Hill, Shinelle Azoroh, Academy Award nominee Quvenzhané Wallis, Tristan Mack Wilds, Caleel Harris, Tessa Ferrer, James Bingham, Solomon Irama, Ozie Nzeribe, Jason Rivera, Christina Jackson and Sean Baker reprise their roles for season two, alongside new additions Orlando Jones and Shannon Brown.
Swagger is executive produced by Bythewood, Kevin Durant, Brian Grazer and Rich Kleiman. The series is produced for Apple TV+ by Imagine Television Studios, Boardroom, CBS Studios and Undisputed Cinema. Francie Calfo and Joy Kecken also serve as executive producers. James Seidman serves as co-executive producer.
With rising concerns of a deeper recession, a bubbling housing market, and ongoing layoffs, many are looking at alternative ways to transition from consumers to producers.
This reality couldn’t be any truer for small businesses and entrepreneurs. As these groups continue to navigate a volatile market, many are searching for innovative solutions, like artificial intelligence (AI), to drive growth and stay afloat during this period of economic hardship.
As explained by TechTarget, “Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Specific applications of AI include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition, and machine vision.”
It is important to note that the field of artificial intelligence isn’t exactly a new concept, but it is evolving — rapidly.
In case you missed it, AI software like ChatGPT is becoming increasingly popular, and it has set forth a new AI arms race as tech giants (i.e., Google, Microsoft) dive into leading the next big thing in tech automation.
Now, here’s a GIF of Bill Gates dabbing for AI! Jkjkjk, he’s just dabbing…kinda? Not really.
It’s also leveraging the playing field when it comes to growth strategy. Take marketing, for example. Marketing is a critical component of any business’s growth strategy, but it can be challenging to identify the most effective marketing channels. Fortunately, AI-powered tools can help businesses optimize their marketing efforts by analyzing customer data and providing insights into customer behavior.
For example, an AI-powered tool can analyze customer data to identify patterns in customer behavior and preferences. As a result, this can help small businesses identify which products or services are most popular among their customers, as well as which marketing channels are most effective at driving sales.
Therefore, one can only imagine how eager big corporations are to use AI in aiding their global expansion, but what about the little guys?
How do small businesses and entrepreneurs feel about artificial intelligence? After all, the pandemic forever altered the ways in which we work, communicate, and engage. Therefore, it is plausible – in fact, indisputable – that AI will impact the future of work as well.
Yet, the bigger question remains: Will this emerging industry pose more of a challenge or an opportunity for small businesses?
We recently caught up with Rebecca St. Aime, Founder of Rele m ‘bèl, to learn how artificial intelligence has impacted her natural luxury skincare business day to day. Check out the interview below.
When you first caught wind of all the buzz about the recent developments in artificial intelligence, what initially came to mind?
Honestly, I’m always looking forward to new innovation and new ways to support my life and businesses. As a sole proprietor, I am the team, so I was initially curious. I became more excited the more I learned about AI.
What made you decide to utilize AI for your business and what do you use it for currently?
At heart, I am creative. I typically have several ideas and businesses that I’m working on scaling at a time. While I love bringing all my ideas into fruition, the truth is entrepreneurship is tiring, especially when you don’t have a full team and are responsible for all the things marketing, creation, branding, packaging, etc. I’ve primarily been utilizing AI as my assistant for content planning on different platforms. However, I’m looking forward to utilizing it for automation as well.
Would you say that AI has improved or regressed the state of your day-to-day business?
I’d definitely say that it has improved the state of my day-to-day operations. I think regardless of what industry your business is in or the industry you work in, AI is here to stay and will only evolve. I suggest more people find a way to adapt it into their work and make it work for them. I say that with the consideration that the future of AI will likely displace several blue-collar work positions (mine included); therefore, I’m utilizing it to optimize the work I’m doing in my 9–5 as well as to assist me in scaling my business.
Are there any concerns that you have about AI right now or in the future?
My biggest concern is that the writing is on the wall and a large population won’t read it or have the foresight to consider the impact AI will have on us. If you are in a field that could probably be done by a robot — quicker, more efficiently, and at a lower cost — you should be planning for what’s to come.
Would you recommend that other small businesses and entrepreneurs incorporate AI in their business strategy? Which businesses could benefit the most from AI?
I one hundred percent suggest small businesses and entrepreneurs find a way to incorporate AI into their business strategies. Make a list of all the things you do for a business and filter through the tasks that you could probably have an assistant do, and look for AI tools that could assist you and fill in that gap. It’ll alleviate the pressure of having to do everything along with giving business owners and entrepreneurs the space to be more creative and focus on the work they love.
You read it here first! Overall, AI can enable small businesses to become more efficient, effective, and competitive in today’s digital economy. From streamlining operations to optimizing marketing, it looks like artificial intelligence is not only here to stay, but it’ll continue to become more advanced in its capabilities.
Even though I am a “one game” type of gamer, I am a multi-platformer type gamer, so while my PlayStation 5 and PC are eternally locked into the latest Destiny 2 expansion and my Steam Deck currently locked into the early access of Spiritfall, there are many games on my phone. My Friend Pedro, Mini-Metro, and Team Fight Tactics were mainstays on my phone but as of the start of the year, there is only one game I login to regularly: Marvel SNAP.
Marvel SNAP is a digital collectible card game from Nuverse that I would describe as a streamlined Smash Up. You are armed with a deck of twelve character/entities from various Marvel properties vying for control of three different locations given an allotment of steadily increasing energy. The game originally launched in October 2022; however, around that time, I was still deep in my fascination with Team Fight Tactics because that’s the power of a good animated adaptation (although, Cyberpunk 2077 is unfortunately not afforded that same courtesy at the moment, although that may change). However, even the fastest TFT games were a minimum 15/20 minutes and I needed something that I could sneak in shorter intervals.
Enter SNAP during its fourth season. When you first log in, the game gives you a preliminary starter deck with super simple cards. The set includes Quicksilver, a 1-drop card that always starts in your hand to guarantee you’re able to play (to wit, one of the developers talked at length at how this design made the game feel better to new players), The Punisher (which subtly teaches the player about positioning in the different locations/lanes), some basic stock heroes (Misty Knight, Cyclops, the Hulk), and Iron Man (a splashy finisher that doubles your score at the set location). It’s not a particularly powerful deck, but it’s to teach you about cost curves and get a sense of interaction.
Like other mobile games, Marvel SNAP features a free to play progression track that can be expedited with the purchasing of premium currencies. While you can’t buy cards directly, you can earn cards with the progression track which requires you to spend credits (you’re able to earn ~450 a day via in-game challenges) and boosters (from winning games and random packs) to upgrade cards to advance your collector’s score which in turn gets you more currency and the process continues. Given how the reward track is structured, I assumed that cards were locked in a semi-set order, although I discovered that very early on I had managed to unlock the rare Armin Zola exceedingly early (although it’d take several other unlocks to fully leverage its potential) as well as some exceedingly pixel variants (the nicer variants were naturally locked behind the premium currency and season passes).
The core gameplay is an addicting loop as matches only take five minutes at most. With only 6 (and occasionally 7 turns), games move at a brisk pace that feels incredibly fair. Drawing 9 of your 12-card deck ensures that there is a pretty high level of consistency, and your game plan is fairly reliable to execute in the abstract. The different locations require a lot of decision making on the fly to respond to the changing landscape. Cards are very intuitive for the most part with various abilities whether they happen when the cards flip over or just innately active.
And to the developer’s credits, the game feels incredibly balanced. This is in part due to the wide variety of archetypes that are available. There are bombastic combo decks built around explosive interaction between cards, zoo style decks that focus on playing lower cost cards in an overwhelming manner, control decks that manipulate the deck and lanes, and more. And this is further bolstered by the devs parsing cards into “Series.” Series 1 cards are the most intuitive and simple cards. Series 2 features slightly more complicated cards while remaining in the realm of the familiar. Series 3 began to cultivate niche mechanics, whereas 4 and 5 are wildly swingy cards, and Series 6 represents the newest, most wild cards that completely change fundamental rules of the game. In a stroke of design brilliance, you’re matchmade with other players based on your collector’s store and division. This means: 1) you’re likely running into people with similar cards to yours, and 2) you’re likely running into people with similar skills. When I was first starting out, I feared about my basic linear on-going into Spectrum build getting washed by some weird combo, but thankfully I was protected from Cerebros and Thanos (although I currently find myself across a lot of cosmic level threats at my current ranking).
However, the fact that it is a mobile game with a microtransaction pricing scheme does mean that even in its less than nine-month tenure, it has managed to perfectly encapsulate every single issue of much more established collectible card games. Card acquisition is a daunting task for newer players. New cards are constantly getting added into the pool with weird niche interactions. Some of the new nuances of the turn by turn aren’t taught spectacularly well. SNAP does at least one advantage over its physical card counterparts in that the cards can be balanced virtually. Also, the fact that it is a digital game means that they can play with some interesting mechanics such as cards only being drawn on a particular turn, powerful effects that would be cumbersome to manage manually, and a fast forward feature when a series of cards results in a loop of indeterminate length.
But on the other end of this brilliantly designed game is the fact that the game pulls from all over Marvel Comics and as a result of playing games, I’ve gotten more invested in learning about some of the characters I’ve played. While there are many I am already endeared to, Marvel SNAP introduced me to characters like Knull, Attuma, Warpath, and the Marvel Specific Dracula. It’s gotten me to properly separate my hatred of Venom the character and Venom the Sony movie, as Venom the card has won me several games. And it makes me giddy that Wave, a Filipino hero, is at the center of a very popular archetype that I’m currently using to collect all of the cosmic cubes. But the different ways in which powers are translated into gameplay mechanics can be fun little puzzles to solve and figure out how they came up with that particular design. It makes every match feel like a miniature Secret War playing out.
In one of my Discords, we share screenshots of end game matches, telling epic stories of how we overcame the opponent discussing strategies and optimizations. It’s a fun game that really encapsulates all of the good and bad of card games and board games, and even though you’d be entering in a new series, I think you’ll still manage to have a good time.
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The post ‘Marvel SNAP’ – A Microcosm of the Collectible Card Game appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.
Apparently, Mother’s Day is the holiday that keeps on giving and giving and giving.
With Mother’s Day knocking at the door, Americans are digging deep to celebrate the special ladies.
In fact, Mother’s Day spending this year is projected to reach $31.7 billion, up $3.6 billion from record spending in 2021, based on the annual consumer survey by the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Prosper Insights & Analytics.
Shoppers intend to shell out $25 more this year on Mother’s Day and are projected to spend a record average of just over $245. About 84% of U.S. adults are anticipated to observe Mother’s Day.
“Consumers are eager to find memorable ways to honor their mothers and other important women in their lives and are willing to spend a little extra on this sentimental holiday,” said NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay.
People buying jewelry and spoiling moms with special outings like dinner or brunch are expected to reach banner average spending this year in both categories.
“Jewelry remains a timeless gift selection for Mother’s Day and continues to capture an increasing market share,” stated Prosper Vice President of Strategy Phil Rist.
“Forty-one percent of consumers are planning to gift jewelry this year, up from 34% in 2021 and total spending on jewelry is expected to reach $7 billion.”
Inflation is not the sole reason why prices for gifts this year like jewelry and flowers have risen, but also “by more consumers participating in different parts of the holidays and really looking to splurge on their moms,” Katherine Cullen, a senior director of industry and consumer rights at NRF,” told CBS Philly.
Shoppers this year plan to honor mothers more with so-called “gifts of experience,” like buying them tickets for concerts or sporting events. As such, those purchases are perhaps a shift from wrapped gifts. That spending is expected to reach the highest level since NRF started monitoring this category in 2016.
Interestingly, a key finding this year is consumers wanting to give purposeful Mother Day gifts is a top preference for many. Some 46% reported they want to find a gift that is “unique or different” and 41% want to offer presents that produce a “special memory.”
Around 30% of shoppers plan to shop at department stores, 27% at specialty stores, and 23% at local small businesses.
RELATED CONTENT: Last-Minute Mother’s Day Gift Ideas From Black Women-Owned Wine Brands