♫ I’d rather be caught livin’ cozy in muh shack,

A shack inna woods instead of in da hood,

No cotton-pickin’ paper money held up inna bank,

Prepped for the Feds end with silver in the tank!

Under water that is... with the fish... cold. ♫

The Ballad of CozyBroz

Yeah, das rite bros... Landlord Chad here, wat up?

So this is a more comprehensive blog detailing what all I went thru to buy muh house. It took a long time, but everything has worked out in my favor so far.

Going back, this all began late October. I saw the house show up on Zillow, and it met some of my criteria.

• Location location location!
• Style and age
• Some acreage or potential acreage nearby.

I drove out to take a look at it and find that one side of the house is a disaster. Melted vinyl hanging and some windows damaged; not good. The rest of the house looked alright though, and there was no visible fire damage to the structure, other than the vinyl. I scheduled a walk thru and the inside of the house looked to be in good nuff shape! Nothing at all like the pictures of the other houses that I’ve posted on here before. The property also has a beat up metal barn in the back and a well pump house.

The seller was asking for $100K, which was a bit too much in my opinion so I haggled them down to $90K, figuring that I could try and get it financed. Still, $90K is way too much for the property given its age, location, and depreciated condition. I figured that it would be a stretch to see if it could finance, and their Realtor seemed to think it would. If it worked, then fine nuff with me, I don’t care! I can pay that off in like 5 years so long I’m frugal with muh money; and if it didn’t, then I could use that to negotiate a lower offer in cash.

After a month and a half, of course it failed the appraisal and didn’t finance. The lender seemed a bit upset too, as if I would dare even try to get them to finance such a dump; or at least that was the impression I got from em. Oh well, so be it!

I submitted a form of termination and told their Realtor that since I couldn’t get it financed, that I could give them a cash offer, but that it wouldn’t be nearly as much as what the seller was asking for. The Realtor was disappointed and said that the appraisal didn’t seem right, and asked if I could try another lender. I didn’t really want to since I was getting tired of it, but I have nothing to lose and agreed to try another lender.

After another month, of course if failed the second appraisal too. The lender was also kinda sus and kept calling me bud and buddy. “What’s up bud,” “how ya doing buddy?” Maybe he was Canadian or something?

Also during this time, the insurance agent dropped out on the home owners policy because they didn’t like the melted vinyl and said that I would have to find a provider that would sign for a builders risk policy. I kinda figured that would happen, but wished they were more on the ball with it than deciding two and a half months later!

I don’t actually hold any crypto. Instead, I've just been saving cash. Thought picrel was sorta related to topic. Trying to pad things here.

It’s now January and I’m pretty much fed up with talking to lenders and insurance agents and I wasn’t about to go for round three. The place is obviously in no condition to be financed, which doesn’t really matter much to me either way. This has been more or less a stall tactic to whittle down the asking price and patience of the seller for the long game!

So I terminate the contract and submit a cash offer of $57K. The Realtor puts the house back up on the market to see if they can reel in a better deal, which by this point they’ve missed the boat in selling over priced shid shacks innawoods. About a month goes by and the Realtor asks if I can go any higher. I bump my offer up to $60K and tell him that’s as high as I can go due to what I have in the bank that’ll go toward repairs. The seller accepts a few days later and we sign a new contract!

I quickly call up an insurance agent that I’ve kept waiting on the sidelines for a builders risk policy and get insurance coverage squared away. During closing, there was some delay in processing the wire from the sellers bank. After 24 hours, I was getting mega pissed off thinking they made off like a bandit because they were behaving as if they hadn’t received the funds while my bank said that it was certainly sent! And before any of you ask, I did wire the funds one day in advance to avoid any delays; So essentially, not my fault!

Eventually it cleared, but by this point I was sus as shid and began to wonder if everything wasn’t a setup. I did verify the Realtor's license way back and he was on the up-and-up as well as the property tax records, but I didn’t ever verify the dang Title Company! But it all cleared up and a week later I got my deed and verified it with the county recording office.

Sometime soon I can finally get chickens and schizo larp; it'll be fun bros!

Now that the house is mine, I’ll begin the much needed repairs and restoration ASAP! It’s gonna take a little while to get it back into shape because I don’t have that much money left after buying the place. I did plan to do many of the repairs myself for the outside, but after seeing some recent bank collapses followed up by a bank run and the fed assets balance sheet shoot up even higher to cover for retard depositors and soon to be moar inflation, I’m just gonna blow it all now bros. Nowhere is safu, except for maybe boomer rocks.

I think 2023 might just be the year to spend all of your saved up cash now or forever say goodbye to it, unless the “war” really works out in our favor. Doubtful, but it’s possible.

I hope I can figure out a solar powered well pump setup. If that does become a problem in the future, there is a stream of water about a mile off and a few other sources of water nearby. I would just have to boil it if I were to drink it and accept my fate in knowing that I’ll likely get cancer from pesticide runoff as I get older. Sometimes you win some and sometimes you lose some bros.

Thanks for reading my blog!

New CozyNet video!

Enjoy!

Spring is around the corner! Spring might be my favorite season of the year, next to winter. I don’t have a whole lot planned except for moar house stuff and moar blogs. I was working on a podcast episode, which is pretty much completed but now I’m hesitant to release. It might be a lil too controversial given the subject material that I rambled on about; so I’m reconsidering the first episode. Might just can it or something, I don’t know…

Back on the house search front; I should probably have mentioned that the seller of the house I submitted a cash offer for about a month back, which I was unable to finance, did finally accept!

I’m pretty excited since this will be my first house. I just hope a tornado doesn’t blow it away or someone doesn’t lite it on fire while I’m away. I would like to share pictures of it, but then again you could easily look it up on Zillow to then abduct me and do terrible things, so I’m just going to hold off of that for now. At least until I get it restored! In the meantime, I can describe it to you in detail and provide a facsimile of the house below.

This is pretty darn close by comparison. The only difference is that my house has two large dormers and a back half that's roughly the same size as the front porch. It's also covered in vinyl and looks a bit ratty at the moment. This is what it would of looked like in its heyday.

“This quaint Lowcountry farm home in the rolling hills of Texas has been transformed by its previous owners over its many storied years into a pleasant Redneck vernacular. It's adorned by a loosely fitted unwashed cadaver gray vinyl décor, a splendid variety of unmatched vintage aluminum framed windows, and an expansive yard view tastefully decorated in a rustic faux-parolee chique. This one of a kind home in the country side can be yours for just $60,000.”

In other words, it looks like ASS! But I plan to restore it back into the beautiful home it once was. I don’t know what the deal is with nasty gray vinyl, but the place is covered in it as well as some of the linoleum floors. If you ever decide to cover your house in vinyl, then choose something with earthen color or go with pure white. Gray just makes everything look dead, depressing, and sad; no soul.

The inside of the house is so so, and will need some work too, but that can wait until the exterior is restored first. I’m not a fan of linoleum, which is used in many of the rooms. It appears that the original barn-wood floors were removed in most of the back rooms and second floor, so that’ll be a challenge to restore.

The second floor was renovated at some point and hasn’t aged well at all. It’s slathered in wood panel siding, linoleum, and a hard plastic insulated drop ceiling. The style clashes badly with the rest of the house, so I intend to remove all of that and insulate the attic instead.

First order of business will be to have the roof re-shingled, restore electrical, have the well fixed, and some of the plumbing redone and sewer possibly replaced. That alone will cost me everything that I have left, so the rest of the restoration will just move along slowly.

I’ll share pictures of it as I go along, so that’ll be fun! I’ll also write a longer blog post on all the bullshid I had to go thru just to get it. It’s been about 6 fuggin months, no lie bros! Anyhow, that’s all I’ve got for now.

Thanks for reading my blog!

The site you see before your eyes was made in VIM, and quite easily too! I’m not using a static site generator because I think it’s easier to just get it done with VIM. Buuuut, I’m not using simply VIM alone; there are a few other things at work here.

As you may have already seen, I’ve been using PHP scripts to generate some of the content that you see here. Since these scripts are centralized to a directory outside of the CozyNet webroot, this makes it easier to apply smaller changes down the road without having to touch every HTML document.

Additionally, I make use of basic HTML documents as templates and combined that with the functionality of the Marvim VIM plugin. Marvim is pretty much a VIM macro storage and recall plugin, where you can save your macro or even a selection of text to recall for later.

I wanted to demonstrate Marvim in a few scenarios so that you could get an idea of its functionality, especially with making web pages.

Let’s say that you want to slap down an image element in a document without having to type it all out manually. With Marvim, you can call up a saved example of this element with all the little bits and bobs.

Another scenario could include a table with a row and a few extra things.

As you can see, it saves on a lot of typing!

How to install

Step 1: Download the marvim.tar.gz file from this link. You’ll need to use the 0.4 version. The 0.5 Beta version is busted crap and won’t work, so don’t even bother with it!

Step 2: Extract the contents, tar xfv marvim.tar.gz.

Step 3: Create a “plugin” directory within your ~/.vim directory, mkdir -p ~/.vim/plugin.

Step 4: Copy the marvim.vim file into the ~/.vim/plugin directory.

Starting up VIM will cause the marvim plugin to auto-generate a ~/.marvim directory. Based on the file type from which you'll save a macro, it will create a corresponding directory for that file type that will contain the macro templates. So for example, if you’re editing an HTML file in VIM and decide to save a selection of text with marvim, it will store that selection in ~/.marvim/html.

How to use

I’m just going to repeat what’s on the VIM plugin site here. It’s pretty simple to use!

Store a new macro to the repository:

1. Record the macro as usual into the q register (i.e. qq..<macro keystrokes>..q)
2. Press the save macro key <F3> (default) in normal mode.
3. Enter the macro name when prompted after the prefix (a prefix will be provided based on the filetype.)
4. The macro is now store in the repository.

Save a template into the repository:

1. In visual mode, select the area you want to save.
2. Press the macro save button <F3> (default) while in visual mode.
3. Enter a template name when prompted (a prefix will be provided based on the filetype).
4. The template will be saved in the repository.

Recall a macro/template by searching:

1. Pess the macro find key (default) in normal mode.
2. Enter a search string when prompted (a prefix will be put by default, which can be modified)
3. Press <Tab> or <Control-D> to auto-complete until you find the macro.
4. Press enter to execute and load the macro for further use in the q register.

Replay the previously loaded macro on multiple lines for each line:

1. While in visual mode, select the area you want the macro to run on.
2. Press the macro find key <F3> (default) in visual mode.
3. The macro in q register will be replayed for every line.

Conclusion

I am aware of other methods in editing web documents, but I still prefer VIM. Since I don’t intend to make any major overhauls to the site design, this has worked out pretty well and I suspect that some of you could also benefit from this approach.

You can register multiple macros to various keys to create a pretty fluent web editor out of VIM. As I’ve already said, combining this with PHP scripting and document templates goes hand in hand.

Thanks for reading my blog!

This one is another big post with a lot of images in it, so to keep from bombing your feed reader, just click the link to the site instead.

There’s a lot in this blog post that might not translate well into a feed reader (i.e. code / scripting), so I recommend reading it on the site itself.

See you there!

Is it just me, or are the chocolate candy tasting kinda crap these days?

Last week was a BUSY week for the site. Seeing the rise in traffic, I spent a lot of time tightening some things down security wise since I saw people in the logs poking around at stuff. I was being lazy and didn’t really care about it until now, but man am I glad that I at least completed the comment captcha form before then!

About 1,442 unique visitors for 2023-02-08! I'm sure there's some bot traffic in there, but it's a lot more than the usual 230 avg. So far the VPS handled it well.

The IRC was bustling for awhile too. I also updated the KiwiIRC web interface and gave it a really cool welcome screen.

Anyways, after shilling my video “Boomer was here” in a few /WSG/ threads, it eventually made its way into the Tweeter normie sphere which saw a lot of eyes and brought lots of traffic. I’m glad to see that it made people laugh and happy!

For any new readers here, welcome to the blog! So, like the first paragraph of the front page says, this is just a place where I post random things. I mostly post about tech stuff, some housing stuff because I’ve been looking for a house, interesting threads that I find on the boards, and mundane things like the choco chip cookie recipe. It can all be quite random and sometimes spur of the moment. Hypothetically speaking, it is completely possible that I might just out of nowhere bring up a topic that nobody asked about.

I do have some things in mind that I would like to write about, but then I get easily distracted by other things and then forget what I was doing or become disinterested. But I’ll get back to it soon™. Just wanted to make this post to say thanks for all the comments, I’ve read em. And also...

Thanks for reading my blog!

Happy valentines!

This one is another big post with a lot of images in it, so to keep from bombing your feed reader, just click the link to the site instead.

I've also cleared out the old feed items, so we're starting fresh! Don't worry about missing out on anything, it's all still on the blog page. This feed is really only intended as a notification service, so the contents are temporal and will be rotated like a log over time.

New CozyNet video, featuring elevenlabs speech synthesis!

Enjoy!