I stand in a brightly lit room, devoid of anything except a dentist chair in the center of the room and a shotgun. Eager for anything to defend myself with, I walk over to the chair and bend down to collect a treasure worth more than gold in this desolate city. Suddenly, all the lights in the room go black except for the one aiming right down at me. A muffled cackle in the darkness practically stops my heart, and I brandish my newly discovered lifeline. This just got real.

Zoom back. I’m not in a brightly lit room with a dentist chair; I’m lounging on a sofa as I clutch a white controller with some buttons. This scene is a small slice of gaming, one of my favorite activities. Other activities I enjoy include reading Wikipedia articles on random comic book characters, integrating functions, listening to music from video games, screwing with my computer, and occasionally participating in a game of Warhammer 40k, a popular tabletop game, with my brother. I’ve been accu...

The Life in Community course is the latest addition to the Upper School schedule. It is replacing the old mandatory freshmen elective, Introduction to Fitness. Since all the non-freshmen classmen will never take this class and are probably wondering what it is, I will briefly describe what the new class covers. LifeCom is taught in sections and each section is taught by a different teacher. While Intro to Fit focused on PE and Health Ed, Life in Community is much more broad and covers such things as finance and core values. Because it is taught in different sections, the class varies greatly. It is supposed to be a more relevant and useful class than Intro to Fitness, the likes of which have completely disappeared from most schools. I think the class needs some tweaking, like allowing students to take it sophomore year so they can try two electives in their first year or adding things like a cooking section. It is, however, based on the feedback from freshmen compared to those...

I’m sure you’re sad that the Halloween season just passed. It’s always so much fun to see the pumpkin carving, house decorating, and child scaring. While everyone loves the Halloween season, people have differing opinions about how it should be celebrated. I recently did a survey about Halloween to see how OES students celebrate October 31. More than 50% of students who took the survey said that they would be going to a party, while 42% said that they would be hanging out with friends in a low-key setting. 21% said that they would sit home and watch TV. Also, 30% said that they would hand out candy at their door, and oddly, 34% said that they would scare little children. It’s pretty obvious from the numbers that OESians want to have a good time on Halloween, and that we cons...