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Are you thinking of signing up for Netflix? Perhaps your friends have accounts on the streaming service and have informed you of the almost endless entertainment fare available there. You have checked out the site yourself and discovered some of the best things to watch on Netflix. And you are now wondering if you should ditch your cable subscription and get on the Netflix bandwagon yourself. Well, to help you make the right decision, let us look at some of the reasons why you might want to sign up for Netflix.

Five Reasons to Join Netflix

People generally join Netflix for the following reasons:

It has an extensive selection

Netflix has such an extensive collection of films, TV shows, documentaries, anime, and Netflix originals that you will probably never run out of things to watch. There are programs from the United States as well as English language or subtitled or dubbed foreign language shows from around the world. Additionally, Netflix continually keeps adding new programs nearly every week.

You will be able to watch the latest entertainment offerings as well as past classics. From the youngest to the oldest member of your family, there will always be something for everyone to enjoy.

It allows for personalization

After you create your profile on Netflix, you can personalize your viewing options. You can specify what types of films, TV shows, and documentaries you would like to watch. You can even make your selections according to your favorite actors and actresses. Additionally, there are PIN-protected parental controls, so you can restrict the content that your children can access.

You can specify that you want your children watching programs that are lower than PG-13, and you can also block titles that you do not want them to view. That way, your children can use Netflix even when you are not around, and you won’t have to worry about them seeing any age-inappropriate content.

It is accessible anywhere and any time

You can watch Netflix shows on your PC, laptop, mobile phone, tablet, SMART TV, game consoles, and other devices. As long as the device has an internet connection and your Netflix subscription is up-to-date, you can watch any show you want at any time and from any location.

You can also use the Netflix app for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 to download films, shows, and other programs. You can then watch these at your convenience, even when you are without an internet connection. So, even if you are out in the wilderness, you will not find yourself without entertainment options.

It has reasonable pricing

For the sheer amount of entertainment fare they offer, Netflix charges a very reasonable amount from their viewers. You can sign up for a monthly plan or an annual one, and the contract is very straightforward. Netflix does not require any long-term commitment from you. If you only want to sign up for a month, that is completely fine. Want to cancel before the month is up? You probably won’t want to, given that there are still so many best things to watch on Netflix. However, it is okay if you do. Netflix will not charge you any cancellation fees.

Once you have signed up, there is no limit to how many films and shows you can watch or how many devices you can watch them on. Also, as your entire family can use a single account to discover the best things to watch on Netflix, it can get to be affordable in the long run. Compare the pricing to what you previously spent on entertainment, and it will become very apparent.

It offers great convenience

Rather than drive your car or commute by public transport to the theater for your entertainment, you can stay home and enjoy the best things to watch on Netflix. Additionally, Netflix will take note of your preferences and make you new recommendations based on those.

You will be able to discover and see films, TV shows, documentaries, and other programs that you probably never heard of before and never would have thought of checking out. And you can watch as much as you want without any irritating advertisements to interrupt the story flow.

If you are a first-time marijuana user and are wondering how to smoke weed, you’ve come to the right place. Whether you are using weed for medicinal purposes or recreational use, it can be an excellent way of inducing mental and physical relaxation. The seeds, flowers, and leaves of the marijuana or cannabis plant contain tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). That is a psychoactive chemical that affects the central nervous system and produces the hallucinogenic highs that users prize.

Select the right weed

Before you learn how to smoke weed, you need to select the right strain. The two most commonly used are Indica and Sativa. Select Indica if you are looking for something to make you relax. It can also provide relief if you suffer from chronic pain, anxiety, and insomnia. Sativa will produce more euphoric highs. You will feel more energetic and creative after smoking it. However, as it can make you feel more active than lethargic, it is best not to smoke it before bed-time, or you will have trouble sleeping.

How to smoke weed

Well, smoking weed is not very complicated, but it may require some practice. The first thing you should know is that, whichever smoking method you adopt, you need to inhale the smoke into your lungs to get high. Simply swirling it about in your mouth and then releasing it will not produce the desired results, which is a mistake that many first-time marijuana smokers make. So, inhale and then exhale. It’s not necessary to hold it in for more than one to five seconds.

You may find yourself coughing a bit, especially if you have never smoked before. Do take care that you don’t end up swallowing the smoke as that might lead to burps, vomiting, or an upset stomach. If you have a cold or a sore throat, leave off smoking until after you have recovered.

Here are a few ways you can smoke weed:

Smoke a joint

You can roll a marijuana cigarette or joint using rolling papers. Of course, you will need some practice in making cigarettes to get them right. You can place a filter tip at one end as with a cigarette if you want. Roll the paper tightly about the weed and twist its end to make sure the joint stays in the rolled shape.

After you roll the benefits of weed in a paper, light it up by holding the flame to the bigger end of the joint to roast it. Keep turning the joint about to ensure that all the sides get warm evenly.

When you finish, place the smaller end of the joint to your lips and smoke it.

Try not to put it inside your mouth as your saliva can dampen the joint and spoil your smoking experience. If you are a first-time smoker, stick to small puffs to avoid coughing too much.

Smoke a blunt

For smoking a blunt, you can either empty the tobacco from a cigar or mix it with dried marijuana flowers. You can also roll an entirely new blunt using tobacco paper. Blunts tend to burn slower than joints, and you can enjoy the pleasant, mellow smoking experience for an extended period. If you are smoking in a group, a blunt is much better than a joint to pass around.

Smoke a glass pipe

The glass pipe has a bowl at one end, which you fill with shredded marijuana, and a carb hole at the side over which you put your thumb. Hold a lighter under the bowl to heat the marijuana. That will create smoke inside the pipe. Remove your finger from the carb hole and inhale the resulting smoke through the mouthpiece. Repeat the process until the weed in the bowl is burnt into ash.

Smoke a bong

Bongs are similar to glass pipes, except that they are larger and hold water. Fill the water through the mouth-piece and put the ground weed in the bowl. Light the weed and put your mouth to the mouth-piece and inhale the smoke slowly. After the bong fills up with smoke, remove the bowl and inhale the smoke more and then exhale. You may need to clean the bong after a few uses.

Hip hop got its start in the 1970s in the Bronx, New York. At the time, the city’s demographics were rapidly changing, with the white middle-class inhabitants moving out to the suburbs to be replaced by African American and Latino American populations. Most of these folks were from economically challenged backgrounds, and it didn’t help their situation that the city cut budgets and diverted resources to the well-off neighborhoods.

Emergence of hip hop music

Unemployment and poverty led to rising crime rates and other social problems. To cope with the challenges they faced, the young people from these underprivileged areas began creating their cultural expressions. They took inspiration from African music, blues, and black power poetry and organized block parties. The hip hop movement that developed was not just about music, but also art, fashion, and dance, and it continues in that vein to the present day.

In the 1980s and 1990s, several distinct styles of hip hop emerged—East Coast Rap, West Coast Rap, Gangsta Rap, and so on—and the popularity of hip hop went mainstream and spread like wildfire in the United States and around the world. It seemed as if the trajectory of hip hop was only in one direction—up. It was not just an enormous cultural phenomenon, but also the best selling music genre in the United States.

Cut-throat competition in hip hop music

The money-making aspect of hip hop music led to fierce competition between rappers and between record companies for more radio airplay, more exposure, and more record sales. Incidences of greed and corruption began making hip hop news, such as record companies bribing radio stations to get their rappers into the top spots in the popular music charts. That meant money and influence decided which songs were going get heard and move to the top, not the actual quality and popularity of the songs themselves.

That was bad news for up-coming and indie rappers. Without signing up with a big label, they had almost no chance of getting radio airtime. Additionally, the record executives began dictating what types of hip hop music the rappers could create. That meant only the already tried types that had achieved acceptance and popularity, not anything fresh and innovative. Far from spearheading cultural development, hip hop music began showing signs of stagnation.

Hip hop music and streaming services

The music industry suffered a severe setback in the 21st century. The economy went into the doldrums, and the emergence of streaming services disrupted the traditional ways of selling music. Fewer and fewer people now wanted to buy cassettes and CDs. Why, indeed, when they could digitally stream what they wanted to hear at any time and from any place? And as digital music more or less replaced the sales of physical albums, record labels began losing the tight control they had on music exposure.

Streaming services like SoundCloud, Spotify, and Apple Music have given hip hop performers an unprecedented chance to make music on their terms. Additionally, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have allowed them to share it with a large listener base. Instead of depending on a record label, they can now manage their music career.

And if they do want to sign up with a record label, they are better placed to negotiate a favorable deal. They can use data from the streaming sites to show the exact metrics of their popularity. They can show exactly how many followers they have, how many streams they have had in a specific period, what locations they are most popular in, how many comments they receive, and more.

While record labels are not in the position to spend as lavishly on record deals as they once did, they have shown a willingness to take the risk of signing upcoming rappers with only one or two hits and a large online following. Hip hop music has proved its staying power, after all, and the companies can withstand a few failures for one resounding success.

Of course, there is no guarantee that music streaming will continue to be popular with listeners in the coming years. Technological developments could usher in something better and bring about further market changes.

By definition, counter-culture is the culture that is at variance with the currently accepted social norm. The term counter culture arose in the 1960s in the United States, around the time of the Vietnam War. There was extensive social unrest and upheaval throughout the country as the younger generation began questioning, rejecting, and overturning established cultural, social, and political values. Revolutionary ideas about sexual freedom, feminism, race relations, drug usage, pop music, pop art, and more began gaining momentum and greater acceptance.

Importance of counter culture

Counter culture altered American society and had wider social ramifications worldwide. Here are a few reasons why counter-culture is important:

It offers an alternative lifestyle

Many people began gathering under the flag of counter-culture as they did not experience a sense of belonging in traditional society and wanted to create a new reality where they could live a more meaningful existence. And that is what makes counter-culture so important. It encourages people to explore their individualism, rather than go along with the general flow.

You don’t have to settle for a nine-to-five existence if you find it oppressive. You can explore an alternative lifestyle and find ways to make it work for you. For instance, you might want to move out of the city to a rural setting and follow a comparatively less stressful life. You could grow your own food, make your own music, create your own art, and take up various DIY projects. You could learn to become more self-sufficient and self-reliant, and, thereby, more self-accepting.

A large part of the stress that people often experience comes from trying to fit in with everyone and living up to other people’s expectations. When you no longer have to do that, life starts to look more promising. With no coercion involved, you can also build better social relationships with people with similar or different outlooks.

It allows for a different way of thinking

In conservative societies, people tend to toe the line and follow conventional lines of thinking about things. If anyone deviates from what everyone thinks is socially acceptable, they may find themselves ostracized and shunned as social pariahs. With counter culture, on the other hand, people can freely question established mores and reject them if they don’t like them.

They don’t have to force themselves to agree with ideas that go against their personal values. Instead, they can express their individuality and not be afraid of being rejected socially and punished legally by their peers. They can write books, perform music, and create art that examines various life issues from different points of view. They can help create a more diverse, vibrant, and tolerant society.

It opens up more opportunities

When you know there are more ways of doing things in the world, you will be able to find more life opportunities for yourself. You will be able to carve out your own path in your professional life as well as in your personal life. As a result, you can have more control over the direction your life takes, make your own decisions on all the important and not-so-important matters, and experience more satisfaction with the way things are going.

You can find or create a job or a career that is more to your liking and better suited to your personality. You can leave a relationship that is not working for you. You can live where you want. You can travel to experience and learn from other cultures.

The danger of counter culture

Counter culture may be less apparent today as our society, on the whole, is more heterogeneous, and people are generally more accepting of differences than they were in previous times. However, while being tolerant and accepting are generally good values to have, it is possible to go overboard and transition into exactly what you were opposed to in the beginning. For instance, you might find yourself opposing and trying to suppress people who reject the everything-goes mentality and want to return to more stable traditional ways. That is becoming a counter-culture in itself now.

When espousing the cause of counter culture, take care that your zeal for personal freedom does not impinge on someone else’s values and desires.

If you dream of becoming a rap star, you are not the only one. With its trendsetting rappers and their lavish lifestyles, hip hop music has taken the world by storm. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that glamor? For many serious musicians, however, a rap career isn’t only about being perceived as cool by the public and making a lot of money, but also about creating a powerful statement artistically about the complexities of the human condition. Listen to the best rappers of all time, and you will get to hear engaging rap songs that range from the light-hearted to the deeply profound.

To become a successful rapper, you need to write and perform similarly hard-hitting songs that resonate with listeners.

Here are five tips that might help you jump-start your rap career:

1. Improve your music skills and learn about song-writing

Creating good music for your target audience should be your top priority. You want listeners to feel an emotional connection with your songs, and that can only happen if you understand the basics of music creation. Study the best rappers of all time and try to understand why their songs work so well. Learn how to write meaningful and rhythmic lyrics. Use alliteration, repetition, and various other linguistic devices to keep things entertaining and dynamic. Improve your lyric writing ability by studying poetry, literature, and different types of music.

Practice and refine your rap delivery style. While studying the best rappers of all time will help, you also want to discover your unique voice. You can experiment with rapping at different speeds and with different inflections, and with singing a capella. Find out which are the most effective places to pause for breath. Learn how to create unique beats for your songs.

2. Find your target audience

It will help to note from the start that music tastes differ widely, and your music will not appeal to everyone. You shouldn’t even try to please everyone. You will have more success if you research the demographics of your target audience—age, gender, likes, dislikes, interests, and so on—and create music that focuses on their concerns and, thereby, will have more chances of resonating with them. The more you know about your target audience, the better you will be able to establish lasting connections with them and build a loyal fanbase.

3. Create music tapes and videos for online self-promotion

After you perfect your music, name it and record it for public release. You can release a single or wait until you have seven or 15 songs to release a mixtape. For a mixtape, plan the song order in a way that creates an effective narrative or emotional arc. Create or commission eye-catching cover art for both the single and the mixtape. Make videos of you performing the songs or hire a professional video producer to create them for you, and upload them on your website, blog, social media, and various music sites for online self-promotion and online sale.

4. Learn about the music industry and music marketing

If you are serious about having a long-term career as a rap artist, get informed about how the music industry works and about music marketing and set goals to make definite progress. Learn how to network with music industry executives and other musicians, and find the right promotional opportunities. Participate in open mic events, attend rap events, take part in freestyle rap battles with other upcoming or established rappers, book live event gigs and open music events for better-known acts. Work on having a better stage presence and interacting with the crowd. Update your website, blog, and social media regularly for marketing yourself and your music.

5. Keeping making and promoting your music

Be consistent about creating and releasing new music. Try to maintain your authentic and unique style, rather than rushing to match trends. You want your fans to see you as someone genuine, not come across as desperate. Keep in mind that the best rappers of all time didn’t become successful overnight. It takes time, dedication, and patience to develop into an excellent rapper. Have faith in yourself. Good things will happen as long as you persevere.

Tattooing is an art. It requires time and practice to perfect a tattoo style. It can take years to master a tattoo style to perfection. Mediocre artists cannot offer the same level of precision required for beautiful and perfect tattoos.

Here’s more on why you should get inked from the best tattoo artists only.

For the Expertise

The best tattoo artists are experts in their field. They have mastered the tattoo style they specialize in and offer a superlative level of service to their clients.

They can ink any pattern you want. They can even make the initial design better due to their expertise. Whether you want something eccentric or anything dainty, whether you want a nature print or skulls and daggers – they can do it all provided it is their specialized field.

The best tattoo artists never agree to a pattern if it not a part of their service offerings. The best tattoo artists are known by their styles or specialized fields. So, make a note of it when looking for an artist for your tattoo.

You can easily find the best local artists via an online search. Use keywords such as best tattoo artist Charlotte NC or something similar depending on your preferred location. You can check the websites of the artists to see their portfolio. You can read about their specialization, service offerings, or interests in their profiles. The best tattoo artists always maintain a website with the latest information about their services. So, utilize the information available to you on the websites to narrow your search for the best tattoo artists in your area.

For the Experience

The best tattoo artists are experienced professionals. They have trained under other experts and worked hard to reach their own level of success. The best tattoo artists are also not defined by years of experience alone. They are also defined by the value of their experience – be it a year, two years, ten years, or more.

The experience of the tattoo artists is valuable for their clients as it results in the best ink patterns. They know how to take a simple pattern to the next level of spellbinding genius work. They know the difference between using colors as needed and not simply for effect. They know the value of restraint when it comes to inking patterns on the skin.

Experience also helps the artists to take due time to complete complicated or large tattoo patterns. They won’t hurry through the process just to get to the next client in line. They will patiently draw each line and fill the colors that need to be filled. They will take proper breaks between drawing the patterns if that is what is required for your well being as well as for the tattoo to take the best of shape.

They will ensure that you get the tattoo that is beyond your expectations. The best tattoo artists are not satisfied with simply meeting your expectations. They will always strive to go a little further than you expect.

For your Safety

The best tattoo artists take all the safety precautions required for the tattoo work. They will never compromise with the safety of their clients.

The best tattoo artists work with the best quality of pigments and tools. They ensure that the tools are cleaned and disinfected properly with each use. There are also disposable parts used in the tattooing tools, which are to be used only once (such as ink caps). All non-disposable tools are sterilized using medical grade disinfectants.

They also ensure that the chairs and the tables are comfortable for their clients. For large and complicated patterns, it is important to ensure that the seating in the tattoo shops is comfortable. The best tattoo artists ensure that the shop is clean and organized. It is easy to trip over tools strewn about the shop. They make sure that all disposable stuff is disposed of properly. They will always use pigments that are the best in quality. They will also inquire if you are allergic to pigments during your initial consultation itself and offer alternative solutions if required. They will also provide you with the aftercare instructions to help you avoid any problem in the tattoo.