garcia.logan hit it on the head with "keeps everything under the brine so much easier." I actually went with the glass weight because I'm too cheap to buy new stuff and my friend gave me their old one. First batch went fine until I dropped it on my foot while cleaning up. Broke a toe and had to eat sauerkraut on the couch for a week. Spring might have been safer for my bones at least.

Put my first brisket on and walked away for 5 hours straight.

Read a tech at a local shop say those pre-2014 steel lines are one of the few jobs that'll make him walk away from a truck. He had a 2012 come in with a pinhole leak right over the axle, said the nylon coating was still shiny on top but the line underneath was completely rusted through. That salt and moisture gets in through the ends just as much as the coating. He charges eight hours labor to replace all the lines preemptively on those years. Paying that now beats being stranded on the side of the road.

Is it bad that I can usually predict exactly which page I'll give up on a fantasy series? I swear my brain has a built-in timer that goes off around the 250 mark and I'm just done. I once made it to page 350 of a huge book and realized I'd forgotten the name of the main character twice already. That's usually my sign to admit defeat and go find something with less maps and more actual plot. It's like my attention span has a hard limit, and no amount of world-building is gonna push it past that point. I think I'd rather read a cereal box than another chapter about a lost kingdom sometimes.

Yeah honestly @james_ross, I feel you on that. I got a pair of raw denim that ripped at the crotch after like 5 months and I wasn't even doing anything crazy, just sitting at a desk lol. Sometimes it's just the luck of the draw with how the denim was woven or something. Double stitching helps but if the fabric itself is thin or has a weak spot, it's gonna fail anyway. I think people underestimate how much variation there is between batches even from the same brand.