Welcome to The Commentaries, a podcast series from TAN in which you'll learn how to read and understand history's greatest Catholic works from today's greatest Catholic scholars. In every series of The Commentaries, your expert host will be your personal guide to not just read the book, but to live the book, shining the light of its eternal truths into our modern darkness. Visit tancommentaries.com to get your copy of the book and to subscribe for access to all the great reading plans, new episodes, bonus content and exclusive deals for listeners of The Commentaries. Hello, I'm Father Robert Nixon, a Benedictine mum and director of the Institute for Benedictine Studies at the Abbey of the Most Holy Trinity in New Norcia, Western Australia. And this is The Commentaries series on The Imitation of Christ by the great Thomas the Campus. Today is day two in this series and we'll be covering book one, chapters six through eleven of the TAN edition of the work. But before we get into the pages that we'll be talking about today, let's begin with a short prayer in which we will call upon the assistance and grace of God to help us to imitate Christ. We begin in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Enlighten, Lord, our souls and hearts, and to our minds thy grace impart. Lead us by thy gentle hand, teaching us to understand the wisdom of thine only Son, the humble, patient, Holy One, help us imitate Christ's ways, and live His gospel all thine days. Amen. Book one, chapters six to eleven of this wonderful work, The Imitation of Christ, continue with advice on a number of spiritual topics. And he covers a number of different things. We begin with of inordinate affections, next in chapter seven of flying vain hope in pride, in chapter eight of shunning too much familiarity, a very important thing, and chapter nine of obedience and subjection. Chapter ten of avoiding superfluity of words, chapter eleven finally of acquiring peace and zeal for spiritual progress. I'm going to go through these chapters and share with you some of the thoughts and reflect a little bit upon them. And our first chapter, which we're dealing with today is on inordinate affections. Now what are inordinate affections, you might ask, inordinate affections are excessive attachments to people, things or ideas or really anything. And God created us so that our ultimate attachment, our ultimate desire, should be for God alone for the joys of heaven. And in fact, the joys of heaven aren't separable from our desire for God. This doesn't mean that we're not intended to have feelings for anything else. Of course, we're intended to love the Blessed Virgin Mary, to admire the saints that we're called upon to love our brothers and sisters in this mortal life. But all of these other loves, apart from the love of God, need to be done in a properly ordered way. And St. Bernard of Clairvaux said, the only thing which we should love without measure is God Himself. And that is something which Thomas A. Kempis would certainly agree with. I mentioned in the last episode how Thomas A. Kempis copied all the works or the Bible by hand four times. He also copied all the works of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. There was a great inspiration to him. So he begins by saying, whenever a man desires anything inordinately, he is presently disquieted within himself. The proud and covetous are never easy. The poor and humble of spirit live in much peace. The man that is not yet perfectly dead to himself is soon tempted and overcome with small and trifling things. See that his weak in spirit and in a manner yet carnal and inclined to sensible things can hardly withdraw himself from earthly desires. When he says sensible things, this is a word, I guess, a slightly archaic expression now. But what it really means is things pertaining to our senses, to our physical senses. So in other words, the things which we see and taste and hear and so forth. He's telling us to be detached from these things, not to become inordinately attached, not to be filled with excessive desire. He tells us that the proud and covetous are never easy. And you think about the truth of that. The more attached we are to the things of this world, the more we are subject to its pains and tragedies. And these, of course, are very many. Everything in this world ultimately is either going to be separated from us or we are going to be separated from them. So it behooves us to moderate our affections for them, our attachment to them. So that we're kind of half ready to say goodbye to them at any given moment. So these are a recipe for the greatest possible peace of mind, which we can find. And in the practical reflection to this chapter, we find the peace of soul next to the grace of God is the greatest of blessings. And we should spare no pains to maintain it within ourselves. And excessive attachment, these disordered or inordinate affections, all are what separate us from that. And I'm sure from experience, we've all learned that lesson, you know, that there is a kind of love, which is Christian charity, but there is a kind of love, which goes beyond this and attachment, which, which never leads to any real happiness. The next chapter is on flying from vain hope and pride. And this is kind of recapitulating what was talked about when he spoke about humility, of cultivating a humble opinion of oneself. And he tells us confide not in thyself, but place thy hope in God. Do what is in thy power, and God will be with thy good will. So we can only do what we can do in this life, you know, and often people find themselves trying to do things which are completely beyond them. But in the end, everything comes down to the grace of God. I mean, even our own abilities, what we seem to be able to do of our own initiative really is just the exercise of the power and grace of God within us, because he made us from nothing. Everything we are and can do comes from him. So for this reason, he says, be not proud of thy own works. For the judgments of God are different from the judgments of men. And oftentimes that displeases him, which pleases men. So here, we're not after human praise and approval. Rather, we're after doing what is pleasing and right in the sight of God. And I mean, often this will be recognized and admired by other people. And there's nothing wrong with that. But on the other hand, that shouldn't be the goal in itself. The next chapter, chapter eight deals with of showing too much familiarity. And this is a point which was quite important in medieval society. And in fact, until relatively recent times, it was considered in polite to be overly familiar with someone. In other words, to treat someone who you've just met as if they've been a good friend of yours for a long time. Or to treat someone who is your superior in some way, either in their position or in a particular professional capacity, as if they were your equal. And in our Australian culture, we're particularly prone to this because we were founded as a convict nation. And so we tend to make an idol of egalitarianism. And I suspect it's probably the same, although I've noticed to a lesser degree in the United States, as it is here in Australia. So he's saying to respect the status, the sovereignty of each individual citizen of each person, not to be kind of invading them with over familiarity, not to be assuming either that we can trust them or that they can trust us. And this is a good principle, especially in religious life, where we consciously avoid having particular friendships with our confreters, our fellow monks, or fellow sisters, as the case might be. So he says, begins with a quotation from the book of Ecclesiasticus. Open not thy heart to every man, but treat of thine affairs with a man that is wise and fearless God. So be careful about who you open up to. Exercise a little caution and prudence. He says, going on from this, we must have charity for all. But familiarity is not expedient. There's a big difference between charity and familiarity. Charity is something which we owe to all of our fellow human beings. Familiarity is something which is only to be acquired through a process of time, through a process of judgment and discernment. I think we read also somewhere in the book of Ecclesiasticus, let your acquaintances be many, but your advisers be one in a thousand. And there's a lot of truth for that. And the practical reflections were advised to avoid worldly company, useless conversations, and those overflowing and attachments of the heart which are neither regulated nor governed by the law of God. For all of these things dissipate the soul, withdraw it from God, hinder it from being recollected, and deprive it of that interior spirit which is so necessary for salvation. They expose it to many dangers and insensibly subvert all interior discipline. This is an extremely important point here that we need this caution and prudence and restraint in order to keep ourselves focused on what really matters. And I think it's fair to say that there's a certain element of Stoic influence in the writings of Thomas the Campus, one of the writers who he quotes very often is Seneca. Now, Seneca was a Roman philosopher of the Stoic school. No one's really sure if he was Christian or not. There are letters in existence supposedly between Seneca and St. Paul, but whether they're genuine scholars don't know for sure. But what he says in his writings about meditation on death, about restraint of speech, about moderation and judicious forethought for all of our actions, all of these things I think are echoed strongly in Thomas the Campus. In the next chapter he deals with the difficult subject for many people of obedience and subjection. And of course, he's writing primarily to people who have religious superiors over them, to canons and monks and nuns. So some of what he says doesn't apply to people in secular life, but a lot of it does, you know, because we've got obedience not only to the church hierarchy, but also to our superiors at work and to people in our own family as well. So he says that it is a very great thing to stand in obedience, to live under a superior and not be at our own disposal. It is much more secure to be in a state of subjection than in authority. And there's a lot of sense in this, because as soon as we get into authority, we're morally and practically responsible not only for our own selves, but also for the welfare and the salvation of others. So, you know, to see that being under subjection to acting out of obedience can actually give us this kind of freedom at times. And we often quick to resent that, but rather we should count it as a blessing. And the next chapter then, another key one and very important to our culture today, of avoiding the superfluity of words. In other words, avoiding talking too much. And this is something to which a lot of people are prone. We talk too much talking for no good purpose, just chattering away, filling in empty silences. But these silences are in fact a privileged moment to contemplate God and divine things. And he begins this chapter by saying, Fly the tumult of men as much as thou canst. For treating of worldly affairs hinders very much, although they be disgorsed of with a simple attention. I wish I could have often been silent than I had not been in company. But why are we so willing to talk and discourse with one another since we seldom return to silence without prejudice to our conscience? So this vain talking, this empty filling in of time with chatter is something we need to guard ourselves against. In monastic life, this is a particularly important thing. We cultivate strict silence. And at other times, even when it's not strict silence, we tend to prefer to be comfortable with an atmosphere of contemplation. So I think it's a good thing to consider. For each person to consider, to ask themselves honestly, am I talking too much? You know, if I'm in a conversation with one other person, am I talking more than 50% of the time? If I'm in a conversation with four people, am I talking more than 25% of the time? If I'm in a conversation with 10 people, am I talking more than 10% of the time? If the answer is yes, then that means that you are talking too much. So I think this reflection is a wonderful guard against that. And it highlights the dangers of it to cultivate silence. And it's something which happens all too seldom in our modern world. And finally, our last chapter for today of acquiring peace and zeal for spiritual progress. So the acquisition of peace is something which we're all called to. Ultimately, we're called to the peace of heaven. But by cultivating peace in our own heart, even during this mortal life, we contribute to the peace of the world. Because you think about it, people who are in conflicts all the time with others normally don't have inner peace. And that's exactly why they get into conflicts with others so much easily. And we're counseled here.  And seldom do we perfectly overcome so much as one vice, nor are we earnestly bent upon our daily progress. And therefore we remain cold and tepid. In other words, we're focused so much on the things of the present world that we forget about our progress in the spiritual life, which ultimately is the key which is going to unlock the door to eternal peace. So let's pray that God may give us that gift of peace, that desire for peace at the very beginning. And that brings us to the end of day two in our study of the imitation of Christ. Thank you so much for listening and for joining me as we go on this journey deeper into our spiritual lives. Next time we'll be continuing our discussion of book one, dealing with chapters 12 through to 19. And until then, may God bless you all. Thank you. This has been an episode of The Commentaries, a podcast brought to you by Tan. To follow the show, study more of the greatest Catholic classics, and to support The Commentaries and other great free content from Tan, visit tancommentaries.com to subscribe and use coupon code C-O-M-25 to get 25% off your next order, including the imitation of Christ and countless more spiritual works to deepen your interior life and guide you to heaven.


Hello and welcome to the session in which we would look at the different type of tax structure. There are three common types of tax structure which are progressive, proportional, which is also, you may know it as a flat tax, and regressive. These structure differ in how they impact, how they affect the taxpayer based on their income level. Before we proceed any further, I have a public announcement about my company, farhatlectures.com. Farhat Accounting Lectures is a supplemental educational tool that's going to help you with your CPA exam preparation as well as your accounting courses. My CPA material is aligned with your CPA review course such as Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, Miles. My accounting courses are aligned with your accounting courses broken down by chapter and topics. My resources consist of lectures, multiple choice questions, true-false questions, as well as exercises. Go ahead, start your free trial today. Starting with the progressive tax system, how does the progressive tax system work? Well, the progressive tax system works in the way that the more money you make, the more taxes you pay. The higher is your income tax rate. So a progressive tax system applies higher tax rate as income increases.  As your income goes up, you'll pay more taxes. In this system, lower income individual pay a smaller percentage of their income in comparison to higher income individual. So if you make more money, your tax rate is higher. You pay a larger percentage of your income. The rationale behind this progressive system is to redistribute the wealth more equally and alleviate income inequality. And this way you don't put a lot of pressure on low income individuals. That's the logic behind it. Now, for example, the US system is a progressive tax system. And specifically, the US system has a seven multiple tax bracket. And in 2022, those brackets ranged from 10% as low as 10% to a high as 37% for the highest income earners. If you can see on the slide, I do have the tax bracket starting from 10, 12, 22, 24, 32, 35 and 37. Again, this is the 2022 tax bracket. These will change every once in a while. So just know we are dealing with 2022. Just to give you an idea, we're going to work with a single individual, but the same concept, whether you are single, head of a household merit filing jointly or merit filing separately. Starting with a single. Starting when you make your first dollar up to 10,275, you pay 10% on that on these earnings. Once you exceed 10,275, so once you make this additional dollar starting at 2,276, when you make this additional dollar above 2,775 up until 41,775, you will pay 12%. As your earnings went up, as you exceeded 10,275 up to 41,775, your tax rate increased. Now, again, once you make this additional dollar above 41,775, so at 41,776 up until 89,075, you pay 22%. Once again, what are we seeing?  Again, the same concept. Then it goes from 22 to 24%. The minute you earn one additional dollar above 89,075, so once you earn this additional dollar at 89,076, you'll start to make, you'll start to pay 24% up to 170,170,050. If we keep going, the highest rate, the highest rate tax bracket is 37, and for a single individual it starts at $539,901. Each dollar you earn above this amount, the government will take 37%. We call this is your marginal tax rate if you make this much. Now, if you make between 170,51 and 215,950, if you make between those, we'll say your marginal rate is 32. Now, in a different session, we'll look at the marginal rate versus the average rate, but just kind of give you an idea. So this is what we mean by a progressive tax structure. The more you make, the more you pay. Now, we also have a proportional tax structure. Again, this is called a flat tax structure. Well, it's also known as a flat tax system. It applies the same tax rate to all taxpayer, regardless of income level. So it doesn't matter how much money you make, you pay the same percentage, which is different than the US system. This system is simpler for one thing. It's simpler just take how much money you make multiplied by a percentage. It's simpler than a progressive system. As it involved one tax rate, it may perceive as less fair, but it does not take into account the ability to pay. So really you would think, well, flat, flat system is a fair system. Right? Why? Because everyone paying the same percentage. Well, actually it looks fair, but in reality, we're going to see it's regressive and we're going to see what regressive is. But let me just give you an example how it works for first. For example, a country with a flat tax rate of 15% would require everyone that earns 300,000 to pay 30,000 to pay the same percentage. If you earn 30,000, you pay, for example, 15% on that. If you pay, if you earn 15,000, you pay 15% of that. And let me show you, let me show you how it works. So if you take 30,000 times 0.15, you pay 4,500. If we'll take 300,000 times 0.15, you will pay 45,000. You might be saying this is fair. They're both paying 15%. Well, here's where the unfairness occur or in actuality, it's not fair. Why?  In a sense that someone is making 30,000. If you take 4,500 from them, they're going to feel poorer. Versus someone who's making 300,000, or let's assume 3 million for that matter. Let's go from 300,000 to 3 million to see it clearly. If somebody is making a paying 15% based on 3 million, they will pay 450,000. This individual can easily afford, if somebody is making 3 million, they'll pay the 450,000 and they will not be affected as much as a person that's making only 30,000 and paying 4,500. Although it's the same percentage, but the dollar, also the 3 million is paying more in dollar amount. But from an ability to pay perspective, the 3 million dollar individual has more ability to pay than the 30,000. This is what we mean by a flat tax system is an actuality. It's a regressive system. Companies like Estonia and many other Eastern European countries, few of them, they have this flat tax system just so you know how it works. Let's take a look at a regressive tax structure. Well, a regressive tax structure, just you need to learn about it. There is no country that uses it. The way it works, it's like basically the opposite of a progressive. A regressive tax system applies lower tax rate as your income increases. So as your income increases, your tax rate goes down. In this system, lower individual pay a larger percentage of their income in comparison to higher income individual. It's clearly shifting the burden to low income individual and no tax system is a regressive. But a flat tax system and actuality is a regressive system. Now, for example, we do have regressive system, but from a flat tax system perspective. For example, sales tax on goods and services are often regressive as the tax amount is the same for everyone. Same for everyone means proportional means flat. A lower income earner who spends a higher proportion of their income on taxable goods will end up paying higher percentage of their income in sales tax compared to a higher income earner. What does that mean? It means an individual that, for example, again, if we're making $30,000 in this individual will have to spend the $20,000 in buying goods and services. If they're paying $20,000 times 10%, so they have to pay 10% tax on that. Well, different from an individual who's making $3 million and they only spend the $20,000 and they only have to pay 10%. Notice this individual, 20% is $2,000. So now you're taking your tax in them, you're taking away $2,000 from them. Okay, and you're taking also $2,000 from this individual. Why? Because they both purchased $20,000 worth of goods and services. It's fair. Well, it is fair, but the person with $30,000 don't have the ability to pay. So in actuality, it becomes a flat tax system becomes regressive in that sense. In that sense, it becomes regressive. Now, what I'm going to do next is work an example to show you how to compute taxes, how to compute the taxes using a progressive tax system such as the US tax system, just to show you how we compute, how much you have to pay, how to compute your amount. What should you do now?  Look at additional lectures, MCQs, notes, true, false. That's going to help you learn the material better. Invest in yourself.  Good luck and study hard.


Dear students, in this module, we are going to discuss the development of family life in modern societies. Family life has changed significantly over the past century, particularly in the developed countries. These changes include declining marriage rates, later marriages, higher divorce rates and increased cohabitation. In today's society, we see that family life has changed significantly over the past century. The major changes include the fact that marriage rates are being increased over the past century. More and more marriages are delayed so that economic or employment opportunities are first secured and then married. So, today's world's preference is financial status, not marital status. Along with this, there are higher divorce rates. In today's world, if you talk about the Pakistani society, you would often see news that you would also read in the media that how in the recent past, divorce rates have been exponentially high in Pakistan. And then the biggest thing is that increased level of cohabitation, the conventional or traditional concept of marriage, which was related to your special life or religious ideology, in which two individuals form a relationship or relationship on the basis of formal contact. Now, this concept is gradually being developed in the modern world. And in this place, cohabitation relationships have taken place in which two consented individuals, when they meet each other and decide that they want to stay in a relationship with each other, they can stay. And for this, they don't necessarily understand the process of marriage. Globally, families are becoming more diverse in structure with single parent families, blended families, and same-sex families. They are becoming more and more common, particularly in the western Europe. The rise of women's employment and education has led to the changes in gender roles and the way in of household labour. So, in today's family structure and family life, we are seeing that gender roles are being changed. Women don't necessarily understand that their responsibilities are only household chores, children's privilege. Rather, they equally understand that the way a man can go into a professional life and create financial opportunities for himself, the same way a woman can contribute to financial opportunities. So, the traditional gender roles in which women's responsibilities were only household chores, children's privilege was only household chores. Now, they have shifted, and both men and women equally understand that this is their equal responsibility, that children's education is also their responsibility, and also that financial responsibility is also their responsibility. So, advances in reproductive technology and changing social attitudes towards sexuality have also impacted our family life. So, as technological advancements are taking place, we are seeing that the technology that women have created is very easy for them. And for those of us who call it a crisis, because of technological advancements, women don't necessarily want to give birth to a child, and for that, they have the facility or the opportunity to give birth to their child to someone else. So, this technological advancement is very interesting on the family unit, it has a major significant effect, and we are seeing that family as a unit as an institution has evolved a lot compared to the traditional family. Along with this, a lot of issues are being created in which the child's identity is a big issue, and the child's parental identity is also a big issue. So, all these processes are producing a unique family system in modern society.  So, in recent past, this has been a big incident, because of which we are seeing that the effects of this are on the structure, on the mobility, and overall on its financial conditions. So, because of this, a big factor has come forward, is that the diverse rate of COVID-19 has also increased exponentially. So, food for thought for you is that you should see how COVID-19 has affected our overall marriage patterns, overall family infrastructure, family structure, and this whole family institution, in which your marriage pattern is a diverse process, and the most important thing is the socialization of the children. So, food for thought for you.


We were presented with different challenges and we chose the challenge of bettering the relationship between cops and students. We decided to kickball just because it was a fun game that anybody can play. We thought that if you get to play with the officers and see them as humans and have fun with them, it will kind of build that relationship that they're there to protect you and not to hurt you. We're mixing the teams. It won't be the high schoolers against the police. It's actually together just to kind of improve those relations and get a natural setting. I'm the high school resource officer here at South High School. I just hope that, like, they see me, you know, other cops are just like me here at the school, you know. We're here just to help and we're here to do our jobs and we want to go home too. I hope that the teenagers understand that officers are cool, they're nice people and we try to get that back a little bit. The police, you know, they're just like everybody else.


గివెకంవెంజిదర攻ayd ఒఫుటాలంగావంంగ loser ఍ఫబడళర міతమలగి డారంఓంటాలిuku 16 minutes plus 30 seconds increment, that's also called classical game. Bleach is 3 plus 2, 3 minutes plus 2 seconds increment from moon number 1 for both sides. And rapid is 15 plus 10, 15 minutes plus 10 second increment. So, there is a difference here, mostly time. And most of the game quality is good because it's classical because the players can see everything in the game. But Bleach itself, that's a spectator game, you can say. Because spectator will like that because we are playing fast. So, I think it's good. But Bleach tournament is not like that. It's mostly considered as classical. Our current world champion is not like that. So, it's a classical world champion. If you want to say something about chess, you have to think about it. If you want to say something about mind game, you have to think about it. Why do you have to think about it when you play chess? When you play chess, we have to think about everything. We have to concentrate on our mind when we play chess. We have to play it when we play chess. And chess helps a lot. When we study, mainly studies help a lot. But we need skills. Mind power, mind calculation skills. We need to improve our body when we solve puzzles. So, our calculation skills are getting bigger. We can feel the match we are playing. We can play the game. We can feel the match we are playing. We can improve our calculation skills. And concentration is the main thing. We have to focus on our mind when we play chess. We have to play the game when we have a lot of distractions. We have to improve our concentration. We have to help a lot. When we study, we have to focus on our mind when we play chess. We have to compare with normal players. We have to focus on our mind when we play chess. We have to focus on our mind when we play chess. There are many sports. We have played chess. We are the first teachers. Where have you seen that we have discovered the world of chess? I have played cricket in different games. I have played cricket in 2-3 classes. After the incident, I came to chess. Chess was the main reason. It was Padmini. She is a great player. She is an international master. My parents are inspired by paper news views. My parents are inspired by newspaper news views. My parents are inspired by newspaper news views. My parents are inspired by newspaper news views. If you are interested, you can play chess. We have joined S.H.C.Center in 5th class in 2012.  grappling


All right, we'll go ahead and get started. Hello, this is the Practical Guide to Building an Apprenticeship. My name is Megan Tew. I am an engineer at CallRail. And you can find me at Megan Tew on Twitter, GitHub, most internet places. And I have the pleasure of giving this talk with y'all today, because last year I got to do something really awesome. So I never thought I'd be able to do at my company, CallRail. I got to create a program for entry-level developers to bring new people into this industry. It's something I'm really proud of. Thank you. So I love apprenticeships. And I think they're a severely underrated part of our professional systems. And I think they deserve more attention for a few different reasons. So for one, they fulfill a very real need. So with coding bootcamps and it generally being easier to learn to code, there are a ton of junior developers out there. But so rarely do we see actual junior engineering positions. But there are a ton of fantastic eager folks that are just waiting for the opportunity to be seen. But further, when we do see these junior positions, they're asking for things like three years of experience. But there's got to be some kind of role in the middle there. Apprenticeships fill that hole. They also help unify and engage your team, so all of you can rally around the common goal of teaching a new developer who's just excited about learning and growing and being part of your team. They also help us create more diverse and inclusive organizations. So historically, the tech population tends to look all the same, especially in the United States. We have a bit of a white male problem. But more and more, we're seeing juniors that are coming out of code schools or that are self-taught, that are members of these groups underrepresented in tech. And apprenticeships provide these folks the jumpstart that they need into long-lasting engineering careers. So what's an apprenticeship? So it's an entry-level program designed for brand new software engineers to sustainably grow their knowledge, establish a solid foundation for their craft, and learn from their more experienced peers. And for us, the way this manifested was a four-month-long program with the ultimate end goal that our apprentices would be hired on afterward as full-time engineers. And a question I tend to get when I talk about apprenticeships is how they differ from internships. Well, for one, internships tend to focus on a very specific project. You may think, oh, we'll hire an intern to write our API docs. They also tend to have a negative connotation. So internships tend to apply like they'll be doing dirty work, like, oh, don't worry, we'll just make the intern do that stuff. It's not great. Internships also tend to be shorter term, so you might have a college intern that stays with you for a semester and is gone after that short period. Apprenticeships, on the other hand, focus on, instead of doing one thing, they focus on sustainable growth so that the apprentices get exposure to lots of different learning opportunities. This kind of program is investment and them as developers. It also implies you'll be honing their craft. So it's long-term programs, typically. So our program was four months long or three, but some can be greater even than a year. These are longer programs focused on growth, not specific things. So now you want an apprenticeship over an internship, it's time to lay the groundwork. So this is all the pitching, planning, and preparation that goes into actually doing the thing. So what do you need to get it going? Well, you need three things. You need a plan. You need cash, because if you expect someone to dedicate all their time and energy and learning and growing, they shouldn't have to worry about putting food on the table. And you need buy-in. So ideally, you have buy-in from the majority of your engineering organization, but that's not always possible. So at the very least, have enough to where everyone that your apprentices will interact with are on board and ready to go. Most importantly, though, the most you really need buy-in from your boss. And this can range in difficulty depending on the size of your organization. So in for-profit companies, they're likely to need to justify the time and money costs of the program. So you've got to lay it out. In for-profit organizations, it tends to be material with focusing on money. So you'll eliminate your onboarding costs. Instead of spending time teaching them about the organization and getting your new engineers up to speed, that's built into the apprenticeship program. As you're teaching them engineering best practices, they're learning your best practices. They're learning your business domain. It also helps eliminate recruiting costs. So especially in the United States right now, we have pretty hard time hiring engineers, typically. But we have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to have someone do it for us. But with apprenticeships, there is such a huge demand for these entry-level roles that people will be bombarding you with applications for this kind of program, and you won't have to worry about that. It also helps with easier hiring of seniors. So I know for myself as a senior engineer, I want an opportunity to help grow other developers. I want to be able to transfer my knowledge and help grow an organization. And that tends to be common among a lot of senior engineers. So when you have an apprenticeship like this, a program like this, that says, we focus on learning. We focus on growth. Come do those things with us. They're also the material benefits of an apprenticeship. So increasing diversity of background and skill, improving your team's connectivity, and even increasing developer productivity. So if you have a senior engineer pairing with one of your apprentices, those two heads are always better than one. And yes, the apprentice will be learning a lot along the way, but your senior engineer will probably be learning just as much if not more during the process.  Program length, so how long it's going to run. Number of apprentices you'll have, and then who's going to do what. So these defined roles are actually really important in a program like this. For program length, we decided that on four months, which actually ended up being three, but I'll touch on that later. Number of apprentices, we said we wanted two because that's perfect for pair programming, and it's enough that we can also split them up without taking all the time away from every team. And then who's going to do what. So we decided there would be one program coordinator slash mentor combo being me, have a manager for the apprentices to help them along their way, and then multiple reviewers to help us out with the application review, code challenge review throughout the hiring process. You also have to decide what they should know when they're coming into the program, what they should learn when they're with you, and how they'll learn it. And these things will vary per organization as your values differ. We decided that we wanted our apprentices coming in to know how to build web apps. They should have built a few Rails apps before and that they should know things like basic control foe, just basic programming concepts. We knew we wanted them to learn refactoring and testing and programming best practices, but most especially confidence in themselves as developers and in their skills because that's huge as you're a growing developer. We knew we wanted them to do pair programming because that's a great way to transfer knowledge as well as work with multiple different teams. What's most important during planning is that you really, really need a game plan. So I did a ton of research in order to create a thorough plan leading up to this program and never once did I feel like it wasn't necessary. Every bit of knowledge I was able to absorb from someone else made our program better. And I kept referring back to our master plan throughout the entirety of the program. So this is the actual outline from my plan and includes things like our goals, what they'll cover, what they'll learn, how we'll do it, all those things. And all this planning was really crucial going into implementation. So actually doing it. And we split this into three phases. You've got hiring, onboarding, and growing. So let's talk about hiring. Our goal here was to establish an unbiased, even playing field for our candidates. And this goes back to our overall goal of increasing diversity. And it's so crucial to make sure that everyone has an equal chance in getting a shot in this program. You've got to remove as much bias as possible if you're going to diversify anything ever. So our hiring process had three parts. An application that they submitted, a code challenge, and then a final interview. And it's important to note we had end-to-end an organization throughout this entire process. So when a candidate submitted an application, they were assigned a hash candidate ID. And that was the only way we referred to them until the final interview. And that was key, like we didn't know their name, we didn't know their email, we didn't know anything about them other than what they submitted. That really helped us reduce the bias there. So our application looks a bit like this, you don't need to be able to read it. We told them about us as a company, who we were looking for, gave them a nice schedule of what the process would be.  And it's really important to note that we actually never used that until it was tie-breakers going into the final round. So we still didn't know who they were, but we could use that in the final selection right before we were able to talk to them face-to-face. It was a hard process. And then the bulk of the application was questions about them. We asked things like, what are you looking to get out of this program? Things like, what does your background bring to the table? What's really interesting about this question is that specifically in the application, we said we don't want folks that have had professional programming experience before. We want, like you should be brand new to this industry, that's who we want, that's who we're excited about teaching. But despite this and their answers to this question, candidates consistently tried to make up for the fact that they didn't have that technical experience. They were tripping over themselves to say, I'm sorry that I'm new, I'm sorry I'm at the beginning of my career. The problem with lack of junior jobs is so bad that they're willing to say anything to just get in the door and they're so sorry about something they shouldn't be sorry about. We also asked, what parts of programming excite you the most? This question was really cool because we really got to get the sense of who was eager, who was excited to learn, who really wanted to be doing programming. We asked them, what makes you unique? And this question didn't end up being great. Ultimately we wanted to get a sense of like just who folks were maybe outside of tech or whatever, but it didn't end up so great. People maybe ended up still talking about tech to try to really push through. We even got like personally identifiable information in this question. So like someone actually told us their height in that question, not quite what we were looking for so we need to rework that next time. We also asked them to tell us about something that challenged them while they were learning to code and that they ultimately conquered and then how they did it. This was awesome question and it really helped us with the decision-making process because the worst questions we were able to sort of weed out the candidates that didn't necessarily put effort in their answers so like, oh yeah I pushed through and I did it. But the best answer is we were able to see their thought processes and how they like stepped through each problem that they were working on, what websites they read for documentation, how they debugged. This was a fantastic question. So to review these applications, we created a rubric to standardize the review as much as possible and a rubric as much bias as we possibly could. We asked our viewers about where in their learning process do you think they are? Just to get a sense because we didn't necessarily want folks that had never written code before at all but we also didn't want folks that already had full-time engineering jobs. And we had our reviewers rate each application on eagerness and excitement, curiosity, and drive. We rated these on a scale of one to six so there was no easy out by just picking that middle number like we always do, right? But this numerical data was key for us because it allowed us to make some really interesting data-driven hiring decisions. So if we had applications that were consistently scored high among our reviewers, we could just push them through that next round. This person definitely feels like a fit for the program. And on the converse, if they were consistently scored negatively, we're like, okay, well maybe this person isn't a fit for the program. Let's not move into the next round. Our next step is the code challenge. So, making a code challenge. First, we needed to decide what we wanted to know, like what we wanted to test in this challenge. And we knew control flow, we wanted to test for things like, can the candidates write idiomatic ruby? Just things like that. And then you gotta figure out what you want. Or the format that you want. So I decided that a TDD style task would work best here.  Then you had to actually write the thing, which is way easier said than done if you've never done it. It's very hard to reverse engineer for what you think the candidates would be able to do. And then leave additional room to allow them to go above and beyond and really show their skills. The way we implemented this, so we gave each candidate their own GitHub repository and they could push to the master branch when they were finished. Looks a bit like this. It was for a program called Greater. And Greater helps teachers grade multiple choice tests and then gain valuable insights on their students' performance based on aggregate data. And the review was pretty extensive. We knew based on the coding schools in Atlanta that a lot of our applicants would never have touched automated testing before. And so we wanted to make sure that they had everything that they needed to be successful, that they knew how to run these tests. They knew what it looked like when they were on them so they know they're on the right path. And we gave them an empty class called Greater where they would write their code and we gave them a file full of R-spec tests. So, and we specifically used some different techniques that we thought they wouldn't necessarily be too familiar with so they could learn a bit as they go, like hoisting with lets. And as we gave them these different scenarios, these different tests when setting up the context, we found that it was very key to give them these comments, right? So, if we're, if we've got a method called score that is grading the test and we pass in nil, well, why might I be passing nil? That seems like a very strange answer to have. But if you provide them the context like, oh, that student just forgot to answer that question so they didn't have an answer and Ruby is in nil. Nil is how in Ruby we represent nothing. And that gives them that context, they need to really grasp onto the problem and understand it. Those are the, those comments are the only context that your candidates have because all they have is what you give them so you really need to give them everything they can to be successful. To anonymize, we had, which is, this is really cool, a script to scrub the commit's author info and then submit a pull request to a separate submission's only repository. And these commits were now only associated with that hash candidate ID. And this was key for us because it preserved that commit's history without risking identifying these candidates. So if our candidates were the kind of people that had like all their work in one commit and they pressed that up, we could see that. If they had multiple commits step by step as they worked through the problem, we could see that too. So we could see their thought process. That was great. And this pull request format worked really well because it allowed our reviewers to assess these submissions in a very familiar environment. So at our company, we use the GitHub built-in tools for code review. So reading pull requests really felt natural to the reviewers and it was in, like, they didn't have to worry about learning a different tool to read code to then assess that different code, right? And we standardized the code challenge review in a similar way to the applications. We used a re-book again, asking our reviewers to gauge each application on maybe can they use control flow? Are they comfortable using Ruby? And these were aligned with the goals that we set out at the beginning. Like, we knew we wanted to test for these things. Let's make sure those things are being met. We also asked our reviewers to provide feedback directly to the candidates on their code. We knew that we wanted this program to be an investment in the community's junior developers and many of those developers wouldn't have received code review ever before and that's gonna be really intimidating, especially when you're submitting code for someone else to look at and then maybe hire you based on. So we felt important to give them actionable feedback so they can learn and grow even if they didn't necessarily get selected for the program. So after the code challenge is the final interview and this is the first time that we've been able to put names and faces to their answers, which is really cool. Our final interviews consisted of three parts, a product and company intro so they could get a sense of who we are and what we do a little bit better. And then a technical conversation and a behavioral chat. And the technical chat is quite different than it would normally be for experienced engineers because you can't really use the same terms or ask the same questions as you normally would because you can't guarantee that the person you're talking with is gonna know exactly what you're talking about. And then there's the disconnect that makes it just awkward for everybody involved, right? So instead, we used the code challenge as a focal point of that technical discussion because that was code that we had both seen and that we could talk about easily. And that enabled us to ask things like, what challenge do you, while you were able to complete this task? So, and that let us see how they were able to work through problems and then how it was then reflected in their submission. We could see what their code looked like versus the challenges that they said they faced. And then we used the feedback that the reviewers gave in the rubric to give them in the interview. And so this allowed us to see how they process feedback in real time, how they asked questions to better understand the problems that they're faced. It was pretty great for us. So our behavioral chat was a bit more like standard job interview questions. But one of the things that we got, unique things we got to ask them was, what would you change about the school you attended? Be it a code school or a college or your self-taught like curriculum. This was fantastic because we were able to get a real idea of like what their learning needs were so we can then assess if they were a fit for the program and then if they were like, how better to match what exactly that they need, how we can best serve them going into the program. So ways to improve hiring, I would really recommend to use an HR platform. We, at this time in the company, we didn't have one yet. And so it ended up being a mismatch of like Google Forms and Sheets and Docs. And it was kind of a mess. It worked for us, but that time used to coordinate all those different Google Suite products was probably better spent like actually in the program. I would also recommend not limiting your code challenge to one programming language. So at CallRail, all our server-side application code is in Ruby and as a Rubyist, that's all I knew. And so I didn't feel comfortable testing someone on code that maybe I wouldn't have been able to write myself. And so, but we had a bunch of great applicants that either came from JavaScript backgrounds or PHP backgrounds, and once they got to the code challenge, we're maybe a little too challenged in having to learn Ruby and then write Ruby for this challenge. And so I think we really missed out on some great candidates that we could have had if only we were able to write in JavaScript maybe. So definitely try to branch out into more of the one language. Also, make sure to be very direct with the application questions that you're asking. So your candidates are just trying to answer the question that you have asked them and they're not trying to deduce some hidden meeting behind the scenes. So ask directly what you want to know from them. Now that you've hired some fantastic apprentices, it's time to onboard them. So our goal is here to set the apprentices up for success and teach them the essential concepts that they need going through the program and later throughout their careers. We really wanted to give our apprentices the same onboarding experience as our regular developers so that they would be on the same page with like that common knowledge set and they still knew what everything was in our system going forward. This includes for us things like info sessions on our different applications and the important parts of our code base. One apprentice like specific thing we did during onboarding was a scavenger hunt. And this was really cool. We basically gave them most of questions like tell me the name of the controller action that does this thing. And then they had to work backwards based on the context clues and the questions to figure out the answer. And this was fantastic because it really helped them become more familiar with this large production code base, the largest they had seen yet and but in like a very low key chill way. It was nice. And in addition to those regular onboarding info sessions, we also gave them specific lessons on more foundational concepts like object-oriented programming and debugging. These are things we typically expect that our more experienced engineers will have going in but we didn't expect of our apprentices. So we wanted to make sure that they had the right stuff upfront. Waste to improve, I'd recommend giving them early exposure to any practices that your team has with things like sprint planning or point estimation. About halfway through the program, I had an apprentice ask me what a sprint was. And that to us seems almost obvious if you've been doing this for a while but to someone that's just coming in that of course they don't know what a sprint is, right? And because of the model that we chose, they didn't necessarily get exposure to being in sprint planning early on but those things are important to our teams. So definitely do that earlier rather than later. Once you've onboarded your fantastic apprentices, it's time to grow them. So there's a lot of info out there about engineering leadership that you can get elsewhere including some of the previous wonderful talks in this track but I'm just gonna talk about like apprentice specifics. So for us we really want to be able to anticipate their needs, provide an inclusive and friendly environment for them to grow and learn in and increase apprentice independence because I believe that independence is one of the key markers of experience in an engineer and we wanted to help them grow on that path, be more independent. So our growth period consisted of and first an initial ramping up period where they were working on like small projects. Maybe they were fixing a bug or resolving an error or making a small CSS tweak but they worked up from there and this was so that they could build up not only their skills but confidence in their skills. They could see themselves getting better and doing more complex work. The second phase were team rotations with our different development teams that were working on customer facing product and this was fantastic because it gave them exposure to all different levels of the stack, different parts of the code base and even different ways of running teams. And this ramping up really showed them how the larger projects that they were doing later on in the program were made up of the smaller ones that they were doing early on. We also made sure to set early expectations for them. So when they came in, they had a roll sheet like this. Software engineer one is our equivalent of junior engineer and we said to be hired on afterwards, which is our goal, please try to hit most if not all of these boxes. These include things like personally verify that your changes work is intended and lean on the expertise of your coworkers to improve your work. We also read this book, Book Club Style, Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Adelaide Oceanier, it's one of my favorites. And this is a fantastic book that gives newer developers a better way to view and intentionally craft their careers as engineers in the longer term. And it gave them a common vocabulary to talk about their progress and experiences with me as their mentor and as well as each other. We also made sure to establish regular communication through one-on-ones. So I, as their mentor, met with them each week and their manager met with them on a regular basis so that they could stay on track and keep updated with their progress. We also felt it important to include them in their team rotation decisions because your apprentices will learn and grow best if they're doing the things that they actually enjoy. One of the goals of the program was to actually help them figure that out. What do they enjoy? Do they prefer front end? Do they prefer back end? Do they wanna do a little bit of all of it? And so by letting them sort of follow their own path, they were able to actually find those passions. We also wanted to give them unstructured time to learn freely because this is such a learning-focused role more so than any of our other engineering roles. We felt it important that they could be free to explore what interests them so they could truly make the curriculum and the program theirs. And most importantly, we were not afraid to let them fail.  And you think, hmm, well, that will definitely fail. But you have to shut your mouth and just say, yeah, let's give that a shot because the most important way to learn, like the most crucial thing for them is to find out what that error message is, like why that happened and then how they resolve it. And you don't get that by just telling them, oh, let's not try it. You've got to see the actual result of their thoughts. This is really key. So ways to improve the growth process. Make sure to look for early warning signs and be proactive about intervening. So junior developers tend to have a harder time admitting that they're struggling, often because they don't feel like they truly own their role yet. They don't feel like developers yet. They're still trying to prove themselves even though they've already proven themselves. They're here in the program. So make sure you're able to recognize signs of I need help and be able to support them in afterwards. Also wanna make sure that everyone involved in the program is on the same page regarding their expectations. So we had a situation where the team leads didn't necessarily know what the apprentices knew as they were rotating on their team or what they should be teaching them. And the apprentices didn't necessarily know what they were supposed to be learning. So this is actually not too hard of a fix. We create a rubric that everyone keeps track of as you go through the program, keeps up to date so that you know they're hitting all the boxes. It's a pretty easy fix, but it's really important in tracking growth and showing the apprentices that they're on the right track. So we will be taking all these ways to improve and the lessons we've learned into our next round of the program this year where we start this process all over again. And to wrap up, we created a master plan for our program. We used a fair, anonymous hiring process to hire fantastic apprentices. We set them up for success throughout onboarding and we grew them into fantastic software engineers. Our results with our program, I'm really happy to say we hired on both of our apprentices afterwards. They've been with us since September now, so our program ended up being three months, four months after, about seven months total. And they are both productive members of their teams. Their teams wouldn't wanna be without them at all. They've been doing fantastic and really proud of them. So some bigger lessons we've learned throughout the apprenticeship creation process. When you're hiring, make sure to listen to early hunches you have about candidates. We had one candidate that submitted an application and they seemed potentially overconfident in a way that could maybe hinder collaboration, but the rest of their application was really strong. So we pushed them through to the code challenge and their code challenge was really strong too. So we pushed them through the final interview, but talking to them face to face, we realized that that initial hunch turned out to be true. And I believe that egos don't really have a place in teamwork or collaboration because they kind of get in the way of having an equal shot. So make sure to go with your gut in these decisions. Also wanna make sure to give yourself a lot of time for this process. So our program was greenlit in June last year and we sat down to plan and realized that in order to end before Christmas, we couldn't have a four month long program. We had to have a three month long program because this does take a long time. Not only to have them there, but the lead up time making sure people could submit two week notices beforehand and hiring and all the planning. It does take a while, but it's very, very worth it. And finally, always, always work with your goals in mind. It will be very tempting to do things in an easier way or the way someone like asks you to do them, but you've gotta remember that you're in this to make a very real impact. With this program, I'm happy to report we provided W2 jobs that paid a living wage with full benefits, which is not typical at all for entry level positions. But these kinds of jobs are the kind of small change that can become something bigger. This is our opportunity to make a big change on a small scale. In tech, we often say that we want to bring different kinds of people into this industry. We say we wanna value education and growth in our organizations. And we say we wanna help junior developers. We wanna give back, right? This is a concrete way to do all of those things. So go start entrepreneurship. Again, I'm Megan Tiu. I'm at Megan Tiu on Twitter and GitHub. I wanna thank all of these fantastic people for helping me either during the research phase or actual implementation of the program. I will be taking questions off stage afterwards and I'll be around the whole conference and I can talk about apprenticeships all day. So please come chat. Thank you.


Good evening, zombies. Gay skeletons. Women. Are you frightened yet? I was not alive in the 1990s, but you know what was? Half-Life modding. In fact, even to this day, some of the most popular games on the market have roots as old 90s Half-Life mods. Thanks to Valve putting the game's development tools out to the public for free right after its release, Half-Life was one of the first FPS games to cultivate a truly lively modding scene, one that still lives on to this day as a matter of fact, for better and for worse. What the f**k is that? Yet amidst all the groundbreaking mods that paved the way for countless games and projects that followed, there's one that today remains conspicuously underappreciated, and in fact has been just about completely forgotten by the majority of the internet. So much so that simple details about the game, like when exactly it released or what happened to the guys who made it, are still kind of up in the air. The mod I'm talking about is They Hunger. Spearheaded by a Canadian guy named Neil Mankey, They Hunger was the second Half-Life project that the amateur mod devs at Black Widow Games took on after releasing USS Dark Star in July 1999. Up until this point, Black Widow had made a name for themselves in the industry by taking commissions from magazine and TV companies to make promotional campaigns for the original Quake games, but it was on the tail end of 1999 going into 2000 that they struck gold with this spine chilling Half-Life mod sponsored by the PC Gamer magazine. Inspired by Night of the Living Dead, They Hunger was a Half-Life horror campaign uniquely set in the 1950s, and then immediately became the talk of the town after its release because of its exceptionally high-quality level design and spooky appeal. This game was genuinely giving young gamers nightmares back in the day, and on top of that, it basically set the gold standard for single-player Half-Life mods going into the new millennia. Thanks to its roaring popularity, two follow-up campaigns were back then released in the following two years, being They Hunger 2 Rest in Pieces and They Hunger 3 Root Awakening. These each continued the same storyline and were also received pretty well for the time. In the modern age though, if you look around online, you really won't find a whole lot of good documentation on any of these games. Almost all of the official websites pertaining to Black Widow games and They Hunger have disappeared, there's surprisingly few videos or reviews talking about the game on YouTube, and there's especially little known about its cancelled source engine remake that Black Widow were once working with Valve to push on Steam. And to me, for something once so famous in the community of one of the most popular games of all time, to suddenly become so obscure and hard to find details on is a bit fascinating, especially something with a name as foreboding as They Hunger. So I guess you could say Curiosity bit the cat, as just in time for the Halloween season I found myself picking up the They Hunger trilogy off ModDB, which also hosts plenty of mod packs and fan remakes for anyone who can't handle some of the rougher and more dated graphics in this thing, and clamoring to see just what this game I'd been hearing whispers of for probably like 10 years now was all about. The full campaign features around 3 hours of gameplay with a surprising amount of variety, and it even comes with a lesser known multiplayer mode so there's plenty of content to sink our teeth into. There's also a few short They Hunger custom campaigns and remakes that have been floating around online for years now, and that's not even getting into the bizarre mystery behind what ultimately came of the studio that made it. So with all that ahead of us, I think it's time we get this show on the road. The story of They Hunger begins in a small American valley town called Rockwell sometime in the 1950s, with the game opening on a cutscene of a radio broadcast or explaining that there's been reports of unknown atmospheric phenomena causing strange electrical displays throughout the city. Then we cut away and spot our main character, or at least his car. He's never actually seen or given a name, but he's said to be a successful author who's been sent by his publishing company on a trip to the countryside so that he can rest and try to find inspiration for his next book. Unfortunately, however, resting is just about the last thing he'll be doing throughout the rest of this game. As one of those electrical displays we just heard mentioned on the radio directly strikes his car, causing him to swerve and crash into a ravine. From here you take control of this character as he abandons his vehicle and swims up to get help, but instead finds himself navigating a dimly lit crypt filled with skeletons that sets quite the tone for the rest of the campaign. Once you finally reach the surface you'll make your way through a graveyard path toward a church, and when you find your way in you'll hear radio reports that these atmospheric phenomena are getting worse and that everyone in the city is being ordered to stay indoors. Hearing screams and gunshots in the distance you quickly grab an umbrella and a pistol and head back outside just in time to see the dead rising from their graves. The rest of the episode is spent fighting through the eerie countryside, trying to figure out just what's happened to these townspeople and make your escape. And it's actually got some earnestly creepy moments, like hearing a scared female cop calling out for help on the radio of an abandoned police cruiser and then seeing what's come of her colleagues just a few moments later. Or how about getting lulled into a false sense of security when you spot an NPC that's clearly a Barney reskin just to see him turn around revealing his zombified state and then promptly opening fire on you. It's moments like these that make me easily see how Half-Life fans back then found this to be so startling. The game is not without its sense of humor though. The first human you come across gets so excited at the prospect of rescue that he completely lets his guard down at the first side of a vehicle and just gets pulverized as we quickly realize that the car was being manned by a zombie the entire time. They hunger definitely carries some of the same comic mischief of the original Half-Life, which I think is great. The weapons arsenal is about the same as the original games too, though they've been lightly reskinned. For example, your MP5s become some weird looking battle rifle thing. There's a shotgun and sniper rifle lifted directly from Team Fortress Classic. And your Glock's had an image of some other handgun lazily stretched over it that makes it look pretty God awful. It's actually the only gun I modded in a replacement for in my playthrough. Anywho, the game actually has a pretty great atmosphere for how primitive its visuals are. The levels are all dimly lit and moody, and even early on the quiet ambience of the crickets really communicates to you this nauseating feeling that something's gone dreadfully wrong. You'll find yourself in a swamp destroying rescue helicopters that have been overtaken by the undead, and even fight your way through a dingy volcanic ridge called Devil's Rift. The campaign wraps up with you manning a train and running over a railway packed with zombies, then crashing a cop car into a gas station and stumbling into the town's police headquarters. The last cutscene however shows that instead of finding any help from the authorities, our character was instead ambushed and kidnapped by a zombie sheriff named Chester Rockwood, who at a glance appears to be the mastermind leading the undead horde. A group of humans burst in just in the nick of time to help set you free, and the game ends on a fade to black with your character's fate left somewhat ambiguous. Now, despite the zany cliffhanger, this first episode is a fun romp that paces itself well and carries a lot of action and memorable moments, and even as someone who has no nostalgia for Day Hunger and picked it up for the first time for this video, I found that it held up surprisingly well for its age. It's creepy, flows just about as nicely as the original game's campaign does, and does a good job of setting up the next episode that came out a little under a year later in September 2000. Day Hunger 2 Rest in Pieces picks up right where the last episode left off, directly into an explosion of action.  From here you slip your way out of the city through its canals, fighting zombie hounds and reskin bull squids along the way, eventually making your way up through a tunnel into some kind of massive facility. Here you start spotting soldiers out and about, and also get your hands on a cool new Tek 9 that's got both a full auto and burst fire mode. It's pretty useful. Funnily enough, I reached out on Twitter and was able to confirm that this gun was actually modeled by Min Lee, the original co-creator of Counter Strike. Small world. Anyway, you'll eventually find your way to a parking garage where you'll spot Sheriff Rockwood talking with a mad scientist named Dr. Franklin, who he's apparently been in cahoots with this whole time. They both spot you and skedaddle away in fear, as this revealed that this facility you've been exploring since you left the canals is actually all part of Dr. Franklin's enormous Rivendale Asylum compound. We break into the asylum in pursuit of the two, and this is where we start getting more exposition on how the apocalypse started. Through various audio logs that the asylum staff left behind, as well as this friendly but timid lab assistant named Alfred. Thank God you're normal. Everybody else here seems to be out of their mind. We slowly piece together that basically the mad doctor and the sheriff were longtime friends who found something in the city water. Whether it was something related to those electrical displays in the sky is kind of left ambiguous, but whatever it was, it drove the sheriff and the doctor so mad that they began experimenting on their patients and trying to raise the dead.  First we see the extent of their cruelty, that they've hooked people on meat hooks and kept their living heads in jars filled with water just to watch them beg for help. These are actually the faces of all the people who worked on the game by the way, which is a neat little Easter egg. Then we catch up to the doctor and the sheriff, who give a speech declaring their desire for world domination before unleashing these freaky Frankenstein monsters named Zorks after us. These things are actually pretty spooky and I found them to be a pretty fun enemy. They're no match for a protagonist however, who blows their lab to smithereens as the doctor and sheriff make yet another narrow escape.  Rest in pieces finally concludes with us making our way through the asylum's therapeutic facilities and freeing all of its prisoners, then crashing a truck and causing an oil blowout that blows up the entire asylum, knocking our player character out and hopefully putting an end to our two antagonist scheme. Overall I'd say this episode is also pretty dang solid. It's a little bit longer than the original, has more weapons and enemies, and overall gives the player more to sink their teeth into, but it also kind of sacrifices some of the subtle creepiness of the original episode with its more involved story. I kind of like how much it leans into the 1950s science fiction horror theme though with this elaborate asylum and lab you explore. Despite how well this episode wraps things up however, it turned out not to be the series' conclusion, as a year later in June 2001 came the third and final episode, which seems to be widely considered to be the weakest, so let's have a look see why don't we. They Hunger 3, A Root Awakening opens with an abstract dream sequence set in a graveyard, where we see a specter of Dr. Franklin once again reciting a pledge to rule the world with his undead creatures. Then we begin hearing the disembodied voice of a woman who tells us that we need to wake up and that we're having a nightmare. Our character finally comes to his senses in a dark hospital, where we hear the sounds of babies crying and come across the now zombified nurse that was apparently taking care of us after we got knocked out and then massive oil explosion. It's a bit of a contrived and confusing opener, but this cool new high-tech pistol thing makes up for it in my eyes. As we head out of the hospital, we can actually catch a funny broadcast revealing that the zombies have now taken over the radio station from the first game's opening. From here the game basically follows a kind of return to form, where we head back out to the countryside of Rockwell and watch more train crashes, then venture out to some farm grounds and even get our hands on a motherfucking flamethrower. Out here we get faced with new zombie chickens and even zombie cattle, which actually startled the hell out of me the first time I ran into them.  At first I thought this was some kind of an Easter egg, but it's damn near impossible to miss, so I have no idea what it's here for. Anyway, we eventually return back to the asylum we blew up at the end of the last episode, which is now completely torched and carries quite the desolate atmosphere. And after rehashing a few of the same levels from rest in pieces, we make it out to a train yard and climb into a box to get some ammo for our flamethrower, just to get trapped inside and once again kidnapped by the zombie sheriff.  Then out of nowhere, the military abruptly sweep in and blow this whole meeting up, indirectly saving you. Though in true half-life fashion, they then immediately open fire on you indiscriminately. Heading back to the valley, we face off against a few zombified soldiers and then even take down a helicopter in a pretty cool boss fight. And as we see more and more of the military deploying in, it's clearly demonstrated that even they are no match for this enormous undead horde, which really puts into question just what the hell kind of training this random author has to have survived this long. We board a railcar back to the asylum train yard and then come across this new character, a friendly deputy named Jerry Hoobs. He talks to us through some thick glass that muffles his voice and makes him incredibly hard to understand, but basically asks us to open a hangar door elsewhere in the asylum for him so that he can get in a helicopter and airlift us both away from this massive clusterfuck and leave Rockwell for good. We oblige and get our hands on a chain gun just in time to be a third party in an all-out tactical conflict between the normal military and their growing number of rogue zombified troops. Then catch back up with the zombie sheriff and the scientist, who apparently both somehow miraculously survived the explosion at the end of the last episode, though Dr. Franklin seems to have been injured badly enough that he's had to rebuild himself as a cyborg.   So you've got to gun him down from inside your helicopter as the deputy circles the compound.  But there's just one last problem.   It is outrageously easy to softlock yourself here. Once you get in the helicopter, there's no opportunities to pick up any more ammo for either of these airfights.  Which I did, but even after making careful notes to pick up as much ammo as I could before the lift off, I still somehow wound up not having enough bullets to take the sheriff guy down. So this is the only part of the mod I cheated to beat, and thanks to the colorful things other people online have said about it, I feel no shame in admitting that.  Presumably the two escape the apocalypse and live happily ever after or something.   This Jerry Hoops guy coming out of nowhere to save you and the sheriff and scientist miraculously surviving the explosion from the last episode both feel kind of cheap. And this campaign's level design is definitely a bit weaker than the previous two as well. There's a lot of dead ends that you'd expect to at least lead to ammo or something, but instead lead to absolutely nothing. And a good majority of the episode is spent not only backtracking, but even recycling levels from the previous episode, which just comes across as lazy, and helps make a lot of a rude awakening feel like an uninspired rehash of the previous two campaigns. Not to mention that even if the ending somewhat sticks the landing narratively and is more climactic than the endings of the previous two episodes, from a gameplay standpoint it's basically broken, and makes an otherwise pretty excellent series and on a very weak note. It kind of anchors the quality of They Hunger as a whole down, and yeah I can definitely see why it's considered the weakest of the bunch. But then again, you could definitely say a lot of the same things about the Zen conclusion in the original Half-Life, so for all it's worth, I think it's pretty impressive that Black Widow managed to make a free Half-Life campaign that's basically on par with its source material and quality, and I'd say it definitely carries its own unique charm that makes the series worth checking out sometime. Nah, I don't really have too much to say about They Hunger's multiplayer mode. It's the single-player campaign that's most revered about the game for a reason, but I tried it out on a server with a few friends and actually found it to be surprisingly fun. At its core it's basically just Half-Life deathmatch but without as many insta-kill laser guns, but thanks to the silenced pistol it almost feels more like Goldeneye than Half-Life at times. Most, if not all of the DM maps are spins on levels from the main campaign, and it's clearly a bit of an afterthought, but I still appreciate the fact that it exists. Anyway, after the release of They Hunger 3 is where a story starts to take a turn for the bizarre. From here Black Widow announced that they were re-branding as a professional studio and were going to focus on creating standalone games from here on out, and they announced in October 2005 that the first project they'd started work on was a source engine remake of the They Hunger trilogy called They Hunger Lost Souls. Black Widow seemed to have negotiated with Valve to get full access to their development tools and asset repos to make this game, and it was even shown off at the 2006 Steam Developer Conference alongside Gary's mod and the cancelled Return to Ravenholm project as examples of exclusive third-party games that would help drive players to steam. However, despite Neil Mankey's claims that the game was around 75% done, it unfortunately went completely silent in 2008. It never came out, the whole studio disbanded, and the guy was basically never heard from again. From the screenshots, it looked like a really cool project, kind of like Resident Evil 4 infused with Half-Life 2 in a way, and even despite some of the more peculiar choices they had made, like changing the setting to Northeastern Europe instead of America and removing the HUD so you have to count your shots and look at a watch to keep track of your health and ammo, it still seemed very promising. The best explanation offered by various online blogs seems to be that Neil had fallen deathly ill to some mystery sickness that pulled him away from the game and left the rest of the remote studio completely directionless as it slowly dissolved without him. But it's extremely hard to find any concrete sources on what actually happened, and it all seems to be mainly hearsay. Some claim that Neil is now dead, though there seems to be a lot of evidence that suggests otherwise. The project's lead programmer said that last he had heard Neil was alive and well, though that they hadn't kept in touch in years and he wasn't entirely sure what had come of him either.  And while that's not impossible, it seems just as likely to me that he's just gotten old and is now focusing on his real life. We might never know exactly what happened to the game or its creator, but a leaked unfinished build of Lost Souls eventually did surface online in 2019. And even though it's apparently a very outdated build and isn't really in much of any playable state, it's still quite the sight to behold. We can piece together from bits of developer interviews we have as well as the leaked material that the story was going to begin very similarly to the original. You'd be playing as a tourist this time, riding in a taxi cab with a driver named Jeff, and then you'd both careen off the side of the road and crash, with the player waking up hours later in a destroyed shoreside restaurant and running to get help but finding no one. You'd fight through European villages, farms, swamps, and cemeteries, and all things considered the game seemed to be shaping up to be quite the interesting adventure. There's plenty of interesting stuff in the files too, including a surprising number of character models. There's ones that are clearly placeholder like Blonde Mossman and this funky looking priest character, as well as more original ones with their own art style.  Now, I'd be lying if I said a lot of the maps didn't kind of just look like Ravenholm, but I still find it sad that we'll never see what would have come of this project had it been finished. Who knows, maybe it would have joined the ranks of the other legendary Source Engine games from its era. In the time since Lost Souls' cancellation though, there's been a surprising amount of interesting fan content for TheyHunger that's come out and kept the bench warm. For example, people have actually gotten it running on the PS2 and Dreamcast, which is pretty cool.  And before the leaked build of Lost Souls surfaced, some guy got fed up of waiting for the game and made his own Source Engine remake of TheyHunger called TheyHunger again. According to the reviews I've seen, it's pretty bad, but I can still rate the effort that went into it. There's also, as I mentioned at the start, a few fan mods set in the same world, like Twilight and Rockwell, and MoreHunger. And also a surprising amount of custom maps for the deathmatch mode given its obscurity. Some Russian team is even apparently currently working on porting the entire series to Half-Life Source, which is kind of bizarre, but I guess it might be worth checking out once it's finished just for the sake of its upgraded flashlight and chapter select system. These AI upscale textures look a little funky though. And of course, you can still play through the game with friends any time using Spen Co-op, which comes prepackaged with all three campaigns and actually might honestly be the best way to experience TheyHunger. The people behind the port seem to have recompiled all the levels to have improved lighting, and they've even combined a good amount of them so you won't have to deal with as many loading screens. They've also packed in some really nice-looking error-appropriate replacements for the weapons, like a new Tommy gun, a double barrel shoddy, ranch gun, and even an old-school battle rifle, which is great because the G36 and Tek-9 never made much sense for a game set in the 1950s anyway. On top of that, the campaigns actually work surprisingly well as co-op experiences and can be quite a blast to run through with a couple buddies.  It honestly gave me the same fun feeling I remember from when I played Left 4 Dead for the first time, and it's also probably the closest thing to an official remaster we'll ever see. So for all that, I can definitely recommend it. From what I can tell though, that's basically where the story of TheyHunger ends. For all of its good and bad, it's the grandfather of Half-Life horror mods, and I think it deserves some recognition. It's a relic of the early 2000s, from before horror became super psychological, and it was fun to come back and be creeped out by good old-fashioned zombies instead of some kind of cerebral enigma that only exists in my head or something. You can really tell this game is from a simpler time, because one, each episode is clearly made out of passion and love, and two, they make the female zombies call themselves mommy to a nerve you, even though nowadays if they did that it would just make half the internet start jerking off. Yeah, the series gets a bit weak at the end, but TheyHunger is still three straight hours of impressive and engaging Half-Life horror gameplay made available to the public for completely free, and I'd say it's definitely a must-play for anyone who has a fondness for the original Half-Life and its history, or who enjoys lighting dogs on fire and beating soldiers and police officers to death with a shovel. Whatever happened to Neil or wherever he might be now, I hope that he knows he made something special. And also that I find him growing his beard out until he looks like the unabomber and creating one of the best Half-Life mods ever, just to disappear and never tell anyone why is kind of hilarious. Is TheyHunger Half-Life's most impressive mod? No. Does it carry some deep metaphor for suicidal depression that you'll be thinking about for the rest of your life? Also, no. But it was still a cult classic for a reason, and if you're a fan of Afraid of Monsters, Nightmare House, or even Cry of Fear, you should try to remember that those games are only possible because of the blueprints set by these three campy campaigns. And in my heart, I think I'll probably always remember TheyHunger as Half-Life's spookiest mod. Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed, subscribe for more, and remember to brush your teeth Hey everybody, this is Dimby, reporting live from the beautiful Isla Vista, okay? Now, before this video ends, I need to ask all of you, tweet hashtag TheyHunger2022. We gotta get this trending, okay? If we can't get this trending, I'm gonna throw myself off of this cliff. Hashtag TheyHunger2022


Hey, this is Brett and this 2022 Chevy Silverado 3500 Crew Cab Long Box Dual Re-Wheel High Country is stock number 13935Z. I'm here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, you're new and used heavy-duty truck headquarters. This 2022 Chevy Silverado has the 6.6 liter Duramax diesel engine. It's the L5P engine, which puts out 445 horsepower and it's paired up with the Allison heavy-duty 10-speed automatic transmission. This truck has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop per the state of Wisconsin inspection process. It has a fresh oil and filter change, all the fluids have been checked and topped off, and this truck is 100% ready to go. I'm going to go all the way around in this video, inside, underneath, start it up and take a look under the hood, give it the most accurate representation that I can of the truck, black clear coats, color, and if you like the video, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel, which is youtube.com, slash Summit Auto, click the bell notifications to get updates on the videos I do each and every day, as well as having access to one of the largest catalogs of vehicle and heavy-duty truck walk-arounds on YouTube. This one comes with the 17-inch polished aluminum wheels, and it has Michelin energy saver AS tires. These are LT23580R17s, and I would say they have like 50, 60% of the tread left on them. The frame and underbody is in really nice shape. This is a one-owner, clean title history, clean car fax out of Montana. Front fender is in excellent condition, no dents or dings, and there it does have all the LED headlights, running lights, and fog lights. I'll turn all those on at the end of the video so you can see just how bright they are. You do get the front bumper parking sensors, the chrome tow hooks, and the grille is in really nice condition. You get kind of that gold, bronze-ish trim on there. Get the true color induction hood. I'll show you how that works in just a little bit. And the hood itself is in fantastic condition. I didn't see any dents or dings on there. It does have the cab lights up top as well. Passengers side front fender, no dents or dings on that. Looks really good as well. And the passengers side front wheel, no major scuffs or scrapes on there. As you go down this side of this 2020 Chevy Silverado 3500, take note of how clean that body is, how reflective and mirror-like that paint is. I take these HD videos so if you're far away or even if you're close by and you just cannot make the trip down but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle, you can see the truck, hear the truck, and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here. So when you do get here, there's absolutely no surprises. And you can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you're at. This video helps you make a smart buying decision. Let your salesman know that you saw the video that was helpful and that brought sense to you. It does come with the box side steps. The dually tub looks like it's in really nice condition. And this back wheel is in excellent shape as well. Back tires have just as much tread as the front tires and they are all Michelin energy savers as well. Frame and underbody other than a little dust, a little Montana dust on there. Looks really good as all the remaining factory exhausts. So it hasn't been altered and the lower rockers all look really good as well. You get the nice factory chrome step bars. And once again, that dually tub didn't see any dents or dings on there. Looks really good. Coming around to the back of the vehicle, rear bumper is in great shape. It does have the backup parking sensors, the rear bumper steps, full towing package which includes the receiver hitch and seven pin wiring. These are auxiliary camera hookups for, if you put a trailer and put cameras on the trailer, that would hook up right there and then work with your radio inside the truck. Tailgate's in excellent shape as well. This is a power drop down tailgate. My guess it's a power lift tailgate as well. We'll check that out in a second. You do get 120 volt, 400 watt plug-in back here. Very nice spraying bed liner. I'm guessing it's probably a factory one. Goose neck hitch, four pin and seven pin wiring back here as well. LED bed lights. That bed liner goes on to the tailgate. Let's see if it is a power tailgate. Yep, it power ups just nicely. Down the driver side, just about as clean as that passenger side. The only thing to note on the driver side, there was one little scratch that we just could not get out, but we did touch it up to the best of our ability. Good news is it does not affect the performance of the truck. Back wheel, excellent shape as well. And other than that, I would say that this truck is probably about 99 percent perfect. Very nice. Driver side doors and cab all look really good. It does have telescopic tow mirrors, blind spot wiring, heated mirrors. The tail lights, built in directional signals. They power telescope out. They power fold in. And this one also has the 360 camera on it. I'm going to show you the back seats real quick. They are in excellent shape. You get the, I think it's cocoa or tan leather with the black leather. Power sign rear window with the built in rear defrost. These headrests do fold down for better visibility. You also get in seat storage. And the release is inside the seat here. So we'll have to get that out. See if I can get, there we go. So you can see back there, nice and clean. And you get one on the passenger side as well. No rips or tears once again. Smells very clean inside this truck. Get factory floor mats in the carpets in great condition. USB, USB-C and a 12 volt power point. These seats do fold up for extra storage.  Child safety locks on the back doors and the inside and bottoms of the doors all look really good. Check out the seats here. Get the bucket seats in front. No rips or tears on them. Get the high country stitched into the headrest. Really a good looking interior. Both these seats are heated in cooled lumbar power seat. Of course, factory floor mats, auto headlamps. It does have heads up display. Cargo lamps, fog lights, push button, four wheel drive, power windows, locks and mirrors. Bose premium sound system, wood grain trim. I'll show you these mirrors, do power telescope out. I always like showing both sides. So you know that both sides are working properly. And then they do power fold in like so and out. All right, we'll hop inside, check out the miles, the radio and everything that this truck has to offer on the interior. You can see that this one has 16,964 miles. Instrument cluster is very nice and clean. Comes with the heated leather wrapped steering wheel, Bluetooth and information center controls on the right. Cruise controls and heated steering wheel controls on the left and I'm pretty sure that's adaptive cruise controls. Truck's got to be on for that to work. There's your shifter for that 10 speed Allison heavy duty, heavy duty automatic transmission. This one comes with the Chevy infotainment system. You get the factory navigation system on there. There is highway 41, so that is working nicely. You get AM, FM and serious XM radio capabilities as well as Bluetooth capabilities on there. Then you get all your different apps on here including the cameras, which I'll show you in a second Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. So you can project your cell phone to the screen.  So you get down the sides of the vehicle. You get a surround of the vehicle.  Every time now if you did put a camera on a trailer you would be able to click that button right there. So a lot of really nice stuff that you can do with this radio and those cameras and especially for towing stuff, it's really nice. Down here is your more tactile volume tune and climate controls, including your dual climb controls heated and cooled seat buttons, push button start. Factory exhaust brake, lane departure warning, parking sensors, power drop or raised tailgate. Hazard lights, stability control, that's for your plug-in in the bed of the truck. You can put all the windows down at the same time. Down here you get your factory brake controller, USB-C, USB 12 volt power point and a 120 volt, 150 watt plug-in. There's your keyless entry with remote start and you can power drop down that tailgate. And then there is your wireless cell phone charge pad. Passengers side, floor mat and seat are in excellent condition as well. Once again, it smells very clean inside this truck. I don't think it's ever been smoked in and the headliner is in fantastic condition. You do get the power sunroof, home link buttons, map lights, on-star and SOS buttons, sunroof and power sign window controls. And then lastly you get this rear view mirror camera. So I'll start it up here. You can see the heads-up display in front of us on the windshield. And then that is a rear view mirror camera so it actually is a video display of what's going on behind you. Now you can turn that off and just make it a regular rear view mirror if you wanted or if you like that camera you can have that on as well. All right, let's see it starts right up. No check engine lights or anything like that. And that is your adaptive cruise right there.  All right, let's go check out under the hood. Check out all those LED lights in the front as well and on the mirrors there's the LED side lights they are super bright. Turn those on with the cargo lamps and I really appreciate you checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video you've been able to verify the quality condition options and cleanliness of this truck all the way around inside. Now all those lights are working nicely and are super bright. Even the cab lights working good. Under the hood we have the 6.6 liter Duramax diesel engine, engine base very clean runs very smooth. Once again, this truck has been fully safe and inspected by our service shop has a fresh oil and filter change all the fluids have been checked and topped off. This truck is 100% ready to go. There is the emissions sticker. You leave the focus. And so that cold air intake comes in right up there goes down this tube right into the air intake there. And yeah, really a nice truck. I would highly recommend it from a quality and condition standpoint and to see more pictures of this truck or one of our 550 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, halftones, three quarter tons, one tons, you name it. We gotta go to that website right there summitauto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle all at summitauto.com. And if you'd like to check out more HD videos you can go to youtube.com.com slash summitauto. Quick about notifications to get updates on the videos I do each and every day as well as having access to one of the largest catalogs of vehicle and heavy duty truck walk-arounds on YouTube over 8,000 videos and counting. In fact, the next second you will see a link to subscribe to my YouTube channel on the upper left. A link to more Chevy Silverado 3500 truck videos have done in the upper right. A link to this vehicle on our website on the lower left. And a link to one of our latest YouTube videos in the lower right. Click those check us out. We're super excited to help with this ultra clean 2022 Chevy Silverado 3500 crew cab long box duly. High country and black clear coat. Thanks again for checking out the video. Remember to like, subscribe and share on the YouTube channel. I really appreciate it. Thanks again.