For the last two semesters, technical issues on and off campus have become more frequent. What started off as something easy to fix turned into larger, more complicated fixes.
First, Blackboard went offline more frequently and for longer periods of time.
Then came the biggest problem of all: the Wi-Fi. Connection became unreliable or nonexistent in certain places across campus.
The reason? Cameron is in the middle of updating internet systems and cables — a long process made longer by how outdated the system was.
Junior Journalism and Media Production major and first-time Cameron Village resident, Matthew Hasley said that though he has only lived in the Village for a week, he has already experienced its unreliable connectivity.
“I think the biggest thing I’ve run into is just trying to find [a device] that works,” Hasley said. “When we don’t have any option available,
trying to use my phone and the connection to your phone isn’t very good.”
Hasley sometimes had to drive to the Duncan campus last semester in search of reliable internet connection needed just to complete his coursework.
(ITS) immediately began working to fix the outage, but ultimately, the university switched
“I know it’s frustrating right now. However, I have a lot of hope and greatly anticipate the changes will be worth the challenges we are facing at the moment.”
It is unknown how the switch from Google to Microsoft products will affect services currently available to students, such as Google Drive.
lose the media I’ve created that I can use in a resume. It’s almost like you’re losing a piece of what you’ve been putting all your hard work into.”
Students are not the only ones experiencing these issues, though.
Many times the Wi-Fi connection was poor there, too.
Hasley, like so many others, has had to find ways around this issue in order to get assignments turned in on time.
“You couldn’t do any homework that [needed] accessing Blackboard,” Hasley said. “I couldn’t take any test unless I [went to] the testing center specifically.”
On top of this, the student Gmail server went dark over two weeks ago.
This halted almost all online communication between students and professors entirely.
Cameron Information Technology Services
- Leah Chaffins Associate Professor, CEFL
to a different system via
Hasley is nervous how this switch from Gmail to Outlook will affect his important saved items.
“It’s a little scary in a sense,” Hasley
Associate Professor Leah Chaffins said she has worked hard to ensure that each of her students are able to receive the information that they need in a timely manner.
“Mostly, I have made a bigger effort in
before and after class,” Chaffins said.
Chaffins also urges anyone frustrated with the university to recognize the end goal.
“I know it’s frustrating right now,” Chaffins said. “However, I have a lot of hope and greatly anticipate the changes will be worth the challenges we are facing at the moment.” Hopefully, campus will see these issues resolved over the next few months, and the university will be
NETWORK UPDATES AND IMPACTS TO STUDENTS
Photos By Collegian Staff
An update from ITS
Sarah Monk Staff Writer
Due to recent issues surrounding Cameron University’s network, rumors have spread regarding the length of repair as well as possible changes coming to Cameron’s email and other network-run systems.
Director of Information Technology services
Kelly McClure said he and his team are working hard to bring all of Cameron’s internet services back up and running to maximum capacity.
“The thing we’re waiting on right now… every building on campus has to be refibered,” McClure said. “We’ll kind of move from one building at a time, starting from the south side of Sheplar and working our way north.”
The new network seeks to bring better and higher-speed internet to Cameron students.
McClure added that full fiber internet functionality has already been set up on the Duncan campus, if students wanted a glimpse of what was to
come for Lawton.
In regards to rumors surrounding Google Drive availability, McClure explains that there were no immediate plans to separate Cameron University from Google.
McClure said. “I would suggest you back that
“We are at some point going to separate ourselves from Google – but now we have no immediate plans to do that at all.”
“We are at some point going to separate ourselves from Google–but now we have no immediate plans to do that at all.”
- Kelly McClure Director of Information Technology Services
information up and keep it somewhere on
some personal storage or flash drive, or in another Cloud storage space.”
McClure added that many of the issues surrounding the Cloud came from Google itself. The problem was so substantial that ITS had no choice but to make the swap to email via Microsoft Exchange.
McClure explained that many problems currently surrounding the network on campus stem from outdated hardware Information Technology Services (ITS) has been working on upgrading.
“Essentially our network is twenty four plus years old,” McClure said. “We started planning in 2019 to upgrade the network, and by planning, I mean, because it’s an expensive undertaking. There’s no way we could do that with the funding we had all in one year.”
In the meantime, Cameron University students and faculty have received an email explaining the network issues campus-wide, with McClure hoping it will clear up much of the confusion.
How have the campus tech issues affected you?
Ask an Aggie
“It’s made me more familiar with other, more reliable resources. I don’t have to depend on [the] same old ones we always use since we had to switch emails to Microsoft.”
Colin Toscano, Freshman - Major: English Education
“It makes operating Blackboard difficult. It never loads and it can put me behind on classes, assignments, and updates from professors. When the internet goes out, I am not able to keep up with notes in class.”
Dezz Williams, Sophomore - Major: Journalism and Media Production
“Last year, it was a big issues, especially in the Commons. I bought a computer from the bookstore for online courses and I couldn’t get on the internet at all.”
Michael Evans, Junior - Major: Journalism and Media Production
“The flex cash issues have made it to where I now I have to plan extra time around getting a coffee or food and it has caused me to be late to really important things. It’s inconvenient. I don’t always have expendable income and that can be the difference between me having lunch or not.”
Ramona Villegas, Senior - Major: Strategic Communication
Matters Of The He rt
Ciera Terry Page Editor
Intimacy in today’s society is surface level at best.
A part of me thinks it’s because of how media-involved love has become, but the other part of me truly believes it’s because of how scared society is when it comes to love.
Fear plays a big role in how humans interact with each other — fear in how someone is perceived, fear of rejection, fear of commitment and fear of being seen yet having a desire for love at the same time.
The act of loving is the act of being vulnerable, and many individuals are not able to meet each other’s needs in that way.
The surge of situationships that last two years or more is ridiculous. How a person can be “together” with someone for longer than six months and not have a title is beyond me.
What’s behind it?
Why is everyone so scared to love?
From phrases like “if he wanted to, he would” to “Why should I have to pay the bill on a date?” — everyone seems to have completely different standards or ideas of what dating even is.
When partners share their needs, they are putting in work to be more honest and upfront about what love means to each person.
The fear of looking like a “simp” or looking desperate is killing the romance of
it all. Dating might seem a bit dead, but ... maybe it isn’t. Love just simply needs a spark and anyone can be that spark.
Love is illogical, but many try to make sense of it — that’s what makes it scary.
Love is about being bold.
Love is about being open and letting go of fear of embarrassment.
Nothing in this world is concrete or permanent; that’s why it’s important to let go of the idea that people are possessions and think of love as an experience to enjoy.
Not everything regarding love has to make sense or fall into a strict play-by-play.
Everyone is desperately craving a “Meet cute,” but when the opportunity comes, many let it pass them by, terrified that they will embarrass themselves or get rejected.
And if someone is out there debating whether or not they should share their feelings with their crush or sitting around thinking “my partner is fine without a Valentines Day,” I’d encourage people to think differently.
The moral of the story is: life is short, be in love, show it, explore it.
CourtesyGraphics
goods!
Black History fact: A look into the past
Did you know that the term “Cowboy” was originally a slur towards Black Americans. According to the Rancho Los Cerritos Historic Site Many non black groups were originally called “Cowhands” and began calling Black Americans, cowboys as a way to demean them. Black American men being called “boy” regardless of their age stems from slavery and the plantation era in the South.
Keke Palmer is truly the star of our generation. There’s really nothing she can’t do.
If you think you’ve ever had a bad day, just know that someone out there has it far, far worse.
That’s the takeaway from “One Of Them Days,” which is produced by Issa Rae and directed by Lawrence Lamont in his debut feature film.
The film stars Keke Palmer (Dreaux) and singer-songwriter SZA (Alyssa).
Released in theaters on Jan. 17, 2025, “One Of Them Days” was highly-anticipated and came out with a firm 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
Dreaux is a diner waitress trying to work her way up to corporate, while Alyssa is a spiritual painter with a leeching boyfriend.
When said boyfriend runs off with the girls’ rent money, they have to do whatever it takes to make up the money before their landlord can evict them.
When it comes to comedies (especially buddy-comedies), there really hasn’t been too much noise about them recently.
We’re in a serious drought of straightforward humor and fun but “One Of Them Days” easily makes up for the lack of comedies in the past few years.
It’s funny and creative and perfectly ridiculous in all the best ways.
It feels good to see her making a large comeback to mainstream movies after all of her many sidequests throughout the years (television, broadway, game shows, a podcast – the list goes on).
Her performance as Dreaux is as vibrant and funny as one would expect from Palmer.
SZA makes her acting debut in this film, but if you weren’t already aware that she wasn’t a full-time actress, you wouldn’t know it.
She makes acting look effortless. She hits every punchline right on point.
I so badly need to see her pursue acting again in the future because she has a serious talent for it.
The most frustrating part of “One Of Them Days” is that it’s simply heinous for the audience to be expected to fully support Dreaux and Alyssa’s friendship by the end of the movie.
As amazing as SZA may be, her performance cannot make up for the fact that Alyssa is a
terrible friend to Dreaux.
Many of the problems that crop up within the movie are unfortunately due to her poor judgement, which leads to Dreaux scrambling to find a quick fix that doesn’t always pan out.
When those problems don’t get resolved, Dreaux is the one to take the hits for Alyssa.
It’s hard to watch the pair remain friends after everything that goes down because they really just don’t uplift each other equally.
Still, as tumultuous as their friendship may be, I have to give it to Palmer and SZA for making it all worth the watching and waiting.
I laughed until my stomach hurt.
There are a few weird and goofy plot points that came up that left me confused about how they would get resolved, like the women’s run-in with the weirdly hostile loan institution or the fate of Alyssa’s art career.
Everything surprisingly came together all thanks to Dreaux’s quickthinking.
“One Of Them Days” is a smartly written comedy and I had a very fun time watching it.
I give the film a clean 4 out of 5 stars.
“One Of Them Days” is currently still in theaters with an expected streaming release for April 2025.
Amelia Lozano A&E Editor
Sabrina Carpenter Best Pop Vocal Album “Espresso” Kendrick Lamar Record of the Year
Like Us”
Beyonce Album of the Year
Chappell Roan Best New Artist “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess”
Courtesy photos
Graphics by Amelia Lozano
ACTS GAME NIGHT
Tawny Vanover Staff Writer
From 4 - 8 p.m. on Jan. 28, the Association of Computing and Technology Students (ACTS) of Cameron University hosted its annual game night in the MCC Ballroom. The event welcomed students with food, games and camaraderie, providing an opportunity to engage with the organization at the start of a new semester.
President of ACTS and Information Technology and computer science major Belinda Foley said game night offers a positive environment for students to become acquainted with the organization.
“It’s a very informal event to bring all the new students… across campus together to have a good time, meet our organization, have some free pizza, and play some games,” Foley said.
Foley explained that this is only the beginning of all that ACTS has planned for the semester.
POWERS UP
Photos by Tawny Vanover
“Game night’s basically just an icebreaker to let everybody know that we’re here to have a good time,” Foley said. “We try to be active, and because the semester starts so quickly, it’s an easy event to throw together.”
Game Night provides an opportunity to become acquinted with ACTS members and encourages friendly competition among students. Games of all formats, from consoles to board games, were available for use.
ACTS member and information technology major Micheal Martinez said that Game Night provides a wonderful chance to network with fellow Aggies and learn more about technology.
“Some of these people have a lot of
know-how, have a lot of intuition on where they’re going,” Martinez said.
“It’s basically networking with a little bit of social mix.”
The event provided a setting for students to relax amidst the chaos of a new semester. As the evening unfolded, groups of students gathered around tables and enjoyed pizza while taking part in friendly competition with each other.
ACTS Vice President and information technology major Jordan Pack said that he’s proud of the effect the event and organization has on students.
“I want to bring people here so they can build relationships with other[s],” Pack said. “Build friendships, start networking–because the biggest part
Cocoa and Smores with the Coordinators
that’s been impressed on me about college is that networking is super, super, super important.”
Game Night has become an ACTS tradition, as Foley has said that it will be the first event of every semester. Foley went on to express her excitement for upcoming events, such as a build-your-resume event, a free head-shot clinic, and a panel for mock interviews.
With the organization’s sights set on serving the students of Cameron,
‘mallow out: At 7 p.m., Jan. 28, in the Great Room at the Cameron Village McMahon Center, the Office of Student Housing and Residence Life hosted Hot Cocoa with the Coordinator. The event included free hot chocolate, snacks, music and fire pit-roasted s’mores.
Photos by Alyssa Martinez
A Soviet Born Too Late: Dommaraju’s 2024 World Chess Championship
Julian Ebacher Sports Editor
On Dec. 12, 2024, challenger Gukesh Dommaraju beat
reigning World Chess Champion Ding Liren at the 2024 World Chess Championship, taking Liren’s title for his own.
Out of this emerges a pattern of championship turnover unlike one we have seen since the early 1960s, with three World Chess Champions in two years.
To put that into perspective, Magnus Carlsen, still the top rated player in the world, was champion for over nine years before he declined to defend his position. Through this, we find a sea of talent but with no clear unifying figure behind it beyond Carlsen, who, despite being removed from the running, is still the dominant figure in the chess world and in the casual mind synonymous with the epitome of chess talent.
This is a world in which the Candidates matches, those that actively determine who is actively participating in the championship games, are in a lot of spectators’
minds far more interesting than those champion matches themselves, for the Candidates, though it may not coronate the king, certainly anoints him.
That anointment can clearly be seen in the person of Gukesh Dommaraju. The fact that he is a chess prodigy does not even need to be said.
The second youngest player at the time and the third youngest player ever to receive the title of Grandmaster, at just twelve years old, he was a complete unknown until just over one year ago, when he surpassed the legendary Viswanathan Anand (a World Chess Champion himself, toppled only by Carlsen) as the top Indian player ever.
Even then, he could not have been said to make massive headlines. He entered into the Candidates Tournament in one of the least interesting categories, and only managed to make his way into that category because the player who would have been selected for that qualified for a more noteworthy point of entry. And yet he won. He played against Ding Liren for the world championship and had to
take advantage of a lastgame blunder in order to keep from failing to take the title.
And yet he won.
That is also, perhaps, the best epitome of his playstyle that I could offer. It has often been compared to that of former Soviet World Champion Anatoly Karpov; that is, extremely boring.
And yet he wins.
Both Karpov and Dommaraju cannot be said to have especially brilliant games, at least not in the conventional sense of the word. You will not find them in the annals of history next to Kasparov, Fischer, Carlsen, simply because they do not have the eye for the plays that make the history books.
And yet they won.
Prior to Fischer, Karpov was the only one who could beat the legend that was Kasparov. That was with a style often dubbed the “anaconda”, where the player ensures that the pressure keeps building until the opponent either cracks or becomes so enveloped by his pieces that they may as well have lost.
Most importantly, because the style is so
boring, because it does not betray its flank for the sake of the world like the greatest and most brilliant players do, it is supremely difficult to find counterplay for it — that is, it forces the opponent onto the terms of that player.
On that note, that fundamental principle, alongside another, undergirded the victory of Dommaraju over Liren: time pressure.
Time and Punishment: Liren’s (White) endgame blunder in the final game of the set, performed with only ten minutes on the clock compared to Dommaraju’s hour, led him to lose the Championship by only one point.
Liren began to run out of time, and Dommaraju, (now) famous for his ability to calculate quickly, takes advantage of the mistakes made as the pressure stacks, finally culminating in the climactic final game and the climactic final blunder.
To leverage external
factors like stress under time is not something that you find, at least centrally, with the geniuses like Magnus Carlsen, and certainly not in the Cold War era iterations of the game. It is to some extent cold.
Some viewers, oxymoronically frustrated with the total amelioration of the game, have opined that it is brutish. They have claimed that he remains inferior to Carlsen, something Dommaraju readily accedes to. But I offer but one rejoinder to silence all others: and yet he won.
2025 Super Bowl: a marketing disaster
Julian Ebacher Sports Editor
With the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles readying to square away for the Super Bowl on Feb. 9th, I am tasked with writing to the grand mass of population who are not fans of either team — that is, anyone not from Kansas City or Philadelphia.
This sort of spectator weariness towards the Super Bowl of all things, the uncontested annual “thing to watch,” has not been matched since the New England Patriots’ domination of the mid 2010s.
Even then, however, it was more an embrace of the inevitability of yet another Patriots victory; there was at least a desire for another team to beat them, even if opinion was resigned towards that not being the case.
The current teams, on the other hand, are forced to recognize that not only are viewers mostly weary — they’re also simply apathetic. Neither team has embedded itself within the cultural consciousness enough to make a name for themselves beyond the simple number crunching.
The key issue faced by both teams (and the Super Bowl advertisers) is simply that the broader audience really doesn’t have anyone to root for or against. The Chiefs just have not managed to attain the heel status that the Patriots had, and the Eagles, the underdogs and natural recipient of the audience’s favor, certainly cannot be called faces, and are often considered one of the most hated teams in the NFL, in part due to their infamous fanbase.
The Chiefs are objectively one of the most dominant teams in the history of the sport, but even so, they simply have not cemented themselves with the same marketing panache the Patriots once had. Part of that was with the legendary status of Tom Brady, who was a household name even to people who did not follow football.
The Chiefs simply don’t have one unifying figure to build their image around. They’ve attempted to do so with Patrick Mahomes, but he still hasn’t managed to get the “Tiger Woods” treatment, so to speak,
solid $523 million. The next highest team, the thentitled Washington Redskins, grossed only $447 million.
If we put that in terms of percent, that’s 17 percent more than the next highest team. In comparison, the Chiefs are not only competing with the Dallas Cowboys and their industrial might — they aren’t competing with anyone.
despite every effort of the Chiefs marketing team. He is only discussed in the context of football, and nothing beyond that. The broader American audience simply does not see him as a sports legend — simply a football one, and that is absolutely devastating to the Chiefs’ image.
In 2016, excluding the absolutely monstrous revenue machine that the Dallas Cowboys were and are, running on almost two decades, the Patriots were far and away the highest grossing team in the NFL, with a
Having won three Super Bowls and appeared in four in the last five years, the Chiefs sit at eighteenth place in terms of total team revenues. If we are to take the same “second place versus them” test from 2016, the second place team, the Los Angeles Rams, make a full 40 percent more money than the Chiefs. I cannot reiterate how much of a disaster this is for them on a marketing front, and, more broadly, it signals that they just are not getting the audience interest that they need.
Their Nielsen Super Bowl ratings are around forty and on occasion dip lower, something that a team of their dominance simply should not be receiving. Once again, with regards to the Patriots during their golden period, they hovered around a solid forty-five mark.
The Eagles aren’t doing much better, at a solid ninth place in overall team revenue despite their consistently good performances. Once again, a lot of that comes down to a lack of a unifying figure, and they suffer the problem even more than the Chiefs do.
Not even their quarterback is anywhere close to as universally recognizable as Patrick Mahomes, let alone Tom Brady, and the lack of unification extends to their popularity, which is basically nonexistent in decentralized amounts outside of Philadelphia itself.
All this to say that neither team really has its finger on the pulse of football fans, and they are going to continue to suffer financially until they can provide something to stir the broader audience from their sheer apathy. So far, they have failed to do so, and it has hurt them in spite of their skill.
