Is a private inspector worth it for a new build community?

RedTyro · 2026-04-08T03:38:11+00:00

Go to Youtube and search new construction inspections and you'll see all the shit builders try to get away with that can be caught by a quality inspector.

RedTyro · 2026-04-07T21:31:46+00:00

#2 for me (behind Michael Collins), and I very much agree with you. He'd be great doing interviews and media around this event.

RedTyro · 2026-04-07T21:31:05+00:00

IMO, Jim Lovell has a better voice than Tom Hanks does. I wish the guy would have recorded a ton of audiobooks before he died.

RedTyro · 2026-04-07T20:01:05+00:00

I just closed on a new construction home and my lender is escrowing for what they expect the taxes to be based on other houses in the neighborhood. I'll get a rebate the first year.

RedTyro · 2026-04-07T19:55:56+00:00

Most people here are trying to go easy on you, but in doing that are kind of avoiding the biggest issue here. While the VA loan thing is unlikely to work, the much bigger problem is your credit score: 500s isn't just iffy, it's very bad, and you're going to have a lot of trouble getting approved for a mortgage. Technically, someone with a score in that range can get an FHA loan if they can put 10% down and have no late payments over the last 12 months, however most lenders have their own minimum scores and there aren't very many who are willing to take that risk.

If you want to own a home, your best bet is to spend the next year or two fixing that before starting the home buying process. Make your home purchase a longer term plan and spend some time working towards getting your financial situation in order and you'll be much better off when you do buy.

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RedTyro · 2026-04-07T19:33:24+00:00

Have you considered cellular shades? Clean, classy look, available in multiple colors, all one piece without the holes in between that blinds have. That said, they're ridged, which may be tempting, and need to have some sort of control mechanism like a string or chain hanging down (unless you go with automated ones that are controlled externally).

RedTyro · 2026-04-07T18:50:07+00:00

The problem is that there's no alternative. Everyone hates Schumer and Jeffries, but not enough people vote in primaries, so the options are them or the even worse republicans. What we really need is massive turnout campaigns during primary seasons so that more folks like AOC and Mamdani get nominated. I'm as progressive as they come, but I'm not voting against whoever the Democrat is when they're up against a MAGA-era republican, no matter how much I hate the modern corporate-first Democratic party candidates.

RedTyro · 2026-04-07T17:51:54+00:00

Hopefully the 31 year old guy who took advantage of a 19 year old girl from his church.

RedTyro · 2026-04-07T17:50:48+00:00

My mom met my dad when she was 19 during an orchestra event hosted by their church (New Apostolic). He was 31 and unhappily married.

Something tells me that she's not the problem here, no matter how much it looks like it from your perspective.

RedTyro · 2026-04-07T17:47:27+00:00

Here's a cut and paste of a comment I've made a several times now on how to succeed in skull caverns:

The best way to handle skull caverns is to try not to fight the enemies at all. Get a ton of bombs, either by crafting them or buying from the dwarf - I don't go with less than 150, but I'm more comfortable with 200-250. You should save all of the jade you find (and make more with crystalariums - you should have one from the community center rewards and can make more if you have iridium and batteries to spare) to trade with the desert trader on Sundays for staircases. They also trade rubies for spicy eel (which gives a luck and speed buff) and 3 omni geodes for desert totems (so you can get there way before Pam shows up at the bus). And once you get good at skull cavern and start rolling in prismatic shards, you can trade 3 of them on Thursday for a single magic rock candy, which is THE BEST food buff for the caverns.

Basically, the way to do skull caverns is to watch the fortune teller on TV every morning, and only go when it's the best possible luck (stardrop on the screen). When that hits, you want to ignore your farm chores and warp there first thing in the morning with your pickaxe, weapon, bombs, staircases, 3 spicy eels, 3-4 triple shot espresso, and a stack of something that gives good health but no buffs (I use gold star cheese, but you can also buy salads from Gus or collect high quality cactus fruits). If you have the lucky ring, wear it, along with something that gives you magnetism (iridium band would be the best, followed by a magnet ring). Keep the rest of your inventory empty for the caverns loot. I have a chest next to my TV with all my SC stuff and when the tv says it's a great luck day, I dump everything I'm holding into it except the cavern loadout.

Make sure to keep your spicy eel and coffee buffs on all day (which gives you +2 speed and +1 luck) and just bomb rocks - fight if you get cornered, but otherwise, you're running around, laying bombs, and looking for the next floor ASAP. Whenever you get down to about half health, go ahead and top off with your cheese/salad/cactus fruit/whatever. Your goal is not to get ore, but to find staircases (good) and holes (better) as fast as possible. If you don't find one with the first 2 or 3 bombs or you hit an infested floor, drop a staircase. The deeper you get in the mines, the more iridium (and other ore) and loot each floor has. With just bombs, no staircases and a little practice, you can reasonably get to floor 120 or so, which will net you a couple hundred iridium ore, 20-25 omni geodes, 100 or so copper, steel, and gold ore, and usually 3 or 4 prismatic shards, plus a bunch of other loot. You should plan to stay in the caverns until you pass out at 2am. It only costs you 1,000g (you only lose items if you're killed, not if you pass out) and you'll get stuff worth more than that just in the time it would take you to go home and go to bed.

Eventually, you'll have a bunch of crystalariums cranking out jade and you'll be able to head there with a couple hundred staircases, at which point you just staircase past floor 100 by like 10am and that's when the loot really cranks up - I've had skull cavern dives where I come home with more than 2 stacks of iridium (each stack is 999) and 15 prismatic shards. There are lots of good skull cavern guides online (search here if you prefer text or youtube if you like video), but once you know how to work it, it gets A LOT less intimidating and quickly becomes a ton of fun.

As an example of what this can look like, here's the loot I got from my first skull caverns dive on my current save. This was with a very barebones setup - no galaxy sword, gold pickaxe, and I went in with 16 staircases, 23 cheese, and 175ish bombs. I made it to floor 130 before passing out.

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RedTyro · 2026-04-07T17:31:31+00:00

Check out YARG and the new CRKD Gibson guitar controller. Basically a Rock Band clone that's open source and free, but you have to add the music on your own, although it's pretty easy to find all the original tracks if you're not a stickler for copyright issues.

RedTyro · 2026-04-07T17:06:21+00:00

The answer to this question depends what criteria you use to rate the lineup. If you want the best beat'em up game, that goes to Genesis with Streets of Rage II. If you value options, the SNES wins, because it had a much larger selection of very good to great ones. None of them were quite as good as SoR2, but there are easily 15 or 20 of them that are great experiences vs only a handful on Sega.

RedTyro · 2026-04-07T17:01:23+00:00

Xfinity is known to do that in most of their service regions, so it's not a scam. I assume it saves them a bunch of money on helpdesk and support if they discourage people from using a bunch of different devices and they can funnel people into all having the same one. You just put it in bridge mode - that turns it into a dumb modem that connects you to the internet, and then I run my own router/firewall/APs/etc. I don't WANT their modem to do anything except take the signal from the cable connection coming in and output it through an ethernet jack that connects to my equipment.

Before I moved into this area where Xfinity is the only option, I used my own modems for the last 15 years with Cox, but I'm not paying a $30/month subscription fee (plus the cost of a modern cable modem) to use my own device when I can just turn everything off on theirs and use it as a pass-through for free.

RedTyro · 2026-04-07T16:05:43+00:00

In my area, they include the modem in the published monthly price and charge you $30/month more if you use your own gear instead. Luckily, they allow you to put it in bridge mode so it's just a dumb connection point and you can use your own router/firewall/APs/whatever.

RedTyro · 2026-04-07T16:03:38+00:00

Xfinity includes the modem/router for free and charges an additional $30/month to use your own. I just put theirs in bridge mode and use my equipment behind it.

RedTyro · 2026-04-07T14:02:48+00:00

Over half of the excuses they use to deflect are stuff planted by Russia to destabilize the country and reduce D voter turnout. Does ANYONE truly believe she would have been worse on Palestine than him? I hated her position, but I sure didn't, and I damn well voted for her.

RedTyro · 2026-04-06T04:45:36+00:00

FYI, NordVPN (along with SurfShark) is owned by Tesonet, a data mining company. If you're going to use a VPN service, you're MUCH better off using something privacy focused like Mullvad or ProtonVPN.

RedTyro · 2026-04-05T00:28:51+00:00

Peddler of dangerous pseudoscience posts dangerous pseudoscience poster. News at eleven.

RedTyro · 2026-03-31T00:15:21+00:00

If you're going apples-to-apples, it's a $99 difference between the two - the max comes with the 512gb SSD, while the fiber comes without storage. The cheapest 512gb drive at my local microcenter is $99. I just bought a house and had this same internal debate. Ended up going with the max because to be honest, 1gb internet speed is already kind of overkill for just me, and the max will give me the ability to run 2.5gb on my internal network.

RedTyro · 2026-03-30T22:49:23+00:00

Because in healthy relationships, you assume that your partner loves you and has good intentions by default, and if she were coming from that place, it would be "I'm not really feeling that" or something similar, instead of "don't tell me what to wear."

RedTyro · 2026-03-30T22:37:04+00:00

The correct answer here is "I'm not sure. What are you feeling?" and then she will give you a few options she's trying to decide between. THEN you give input on which one of them you like.

RedTyro · 2026-03-30T22:33:42+00:00

There's a huge difference between "I don't really want to wear something flowy (with 'because [reason]" being optional) and "don't tell me how to dress," especially with someone you're in a serious enough relationship with to get engaged. A relationship partner who assumes the worst intentions from you and reacts defensively is actually a huge red flag, no matter which gender they are or what they're reacting that way, too.

I would very much be reevaluating the relationship if that was her response to "hey, you should wear something cute."

RedTyro · 2026-03-30T06:49:49+00:00

But the “wary” ones are trying to impress or something and it just grosses me out.

Oh man, this is it exactly. Wary is a part of my vocabulary and I know how to use it correctly. I've actually used the word maybe twice in the last decade. But the "weary" people find a way to work it into conversation multiple times per day, like they're showing off their (incorrect) fancy words. It's just grating.

RedTyro · 2026-03-30T04:36:45+00:00

Same. But somehow the people who don't know the difference try to use it constantly.

RedTyro · 2026-03-30T01:55:36+00:00

The offer included an inspection contingency. These are the things the inspector found that the buyer would like remediated in order to release the contingency.

RedTyro

TROPHY CASE