Pumpkin painting, hot cocoa, live music and beanbag toss games attracted spectators to Amherst’s first-annual “Rock the Block” event Saturday afternoon. Members of the Amherst College community flocked to Valentine Quad in spite of the gloomy weather to relax and mingle with fellow attendees.

Amherst’s Department of Spanish welcomed famed cartoonist Jaime Hernandez to Fayerweather’s Pruyne Lecture Hall on Wednesday, Sept. 30. He sat on a panel alongside Professor of Spanish Ilan Stavans, as well as Visiting Professor of Spanish Frederick Aldama, who wrote about Hernandez in his book “Your Brain on Latino Comics.” The Spanish department hosted a small reception afterwards.

The Amherst Center for Russian Culture hosted an opening reception for its new exhibition in the Russian Center Art Gallery on Oct. 2. The exhibition, which is located on the second floor of Webster Hall, is called “ПОД ОТКРЫТЫМ НЕБОМ — Journeys in Space and Memory: Urban Scenes and Landscapes by Russian Artists.” The Russian words roughly translate to “Under the Open Sky.” The works were chosen by the Mead Art Museum’s senior curator, Bettina Jungen, and the exhibition features a range of painted works from the Thomas P. Whitney ’37 Collection.

Whenever I have something important to do in the morning, the fear of oversleeping plagues me so much that I spend the entire evening obsessively checking that my alarm clock is set.

Superstar rappers Future and Drake released their mixtape “What a Time to be Alive” on Tuesday Sept. 20. The mixtape resulted from a six-day collaboration between the two artists, and the fans received the album with enthusiasm. Though Drake has been featured on every album by Future, the two make a somewhat questionable pair for a joint mixtape.