Hello, I am a student in graduate school, and I’ve joined this forum to learn more about the occult and occult culture. I’m genuinely interested in your experiences and hope to learn all I can about the occult and magical practices. I intend to be active here on the forum.
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First of all, the point of a forum is to share experienced here so all can see them, and to ask for otherwise is somewhat selfish and disrespectful of the forum as an entity. Also, if you’re writing a paper, you’re not the first student to think they can come in a psychoanalyse the whole group - we’re not a curiosity or your lab rats, be real about this or don’t. The entities are real, give respect and you’ll get it, don’t at your own risk.
Importantly it’s generally not a good idea to put personal emails in Googleable forum threads of any kind. Especially young people that become easy targets for questionable characters - I don’t mean people here, this isn’t facebook, I mean as a general common sense practice for self-preservation. I suggest you edit that out. I flagged your post for moderator attention and they may do it for you if they feel it’s sensible.
I assume you’ve read the rules, putting them here for convenient reference.
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OP, you would get more out of using the search function or just browsing than you would with individuals sending individual emails probably.
I encourage you to write an introduction in the introduction format and just participate. That’s the best way to learn.
In regards to questionable characters…there are plenty here who WOULD use it for targets, just for practice…let’s not kid ourselves here, @Maulbeere
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I don’t think that’s fair, though at the same time I wouldn’t be surprised, humans being humans.
Sometimes people behave how you treat them, and live up to expectations if they know they’re there. So I didn’t want to tar people with that brush and set them up to think that way of themselves… or put the idea in someones head and direct that towards this OP.
That’s not the kind of magik I find intelligent or helpful, but more than that it’s just that’s basic headology.
However, so what if they do? As far as I’m concerned, any “mage” petty enough to throw a curse at a random person for such transient emotional reasons doesn’t have enough discernment or self-control to be worth worrying about. It’s no good having tons of emotional energy when you can’t control it.
@NuclearTurnip A bigger risk for you than spiteful children thinking they want to play ‘darque magickian’, is identity theft.
This site uses emails as logins. If that is the email you log in with, and then the password can be brute forced in about 10 minutes - they’ll do that not to use this account, but as many people reuse email/pwd combinations in other sites that could have card or personal info, this is a thing hackers are known to rely on.
Hopefully you don’t use the same email password combo on, say Amazon where you have card info stored, but if you do, I suggest changing that practice, use different passwords for every site - you can generate and store them in an encrypted password vault like keepass - and never, ever publish publicly an email that you use as a login,and if you must, make sure the accounts using it have a very strong password that’s unique and changed frequently.
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Actually all of your post was good…but quoting this as a SUPER LIKE. 
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Thank you so much for your concern and input. I’m currently unable to edit or delete the post, though. Can a moderator help?
Edit: someone beat me to it. Thank you!
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I flagged it and the moderator deleted the email address from your post so it’s all good.
Welcome 
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Maulbeere, thank you for your comment. I would like to address your concerns, if that’s alright.
I’m sorry if you were offended by my request for information, I was just offering a way for forum members to share directly with me if they wanted to. Of course, no one has to talk to me, and I wouldn’t push anyone to share if they don’t want to.
I’d like to address your concerns about being treated like “lab rats.” I definitely do not intend to analyze anyone here and do not want anyone here to feel as though they are being treated that way. I don’t even know how to do psychoanalysis! 
I’m genuinely here to learn from all of you, in an open and friendly way.
Thank you again for your response and your time!
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I like the avavatar and UN, though I thought at first it was a poke ball with a moldy fez.
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Whether you had taken steps to mitigate the risk of publishing your email publicly or not, my information was not only for you - it’s for other people reading this that may not know such things.
Yannow, it being a forum, after all.
Why would you assume I’m offended? Because I don’t use 'lol’s and emoticons every 3 words? You could have just asked and I’d tell you ‘no’.
I am wondering why you’d
a) announce you’re a grad student though this is irrelevant to your status as a black magickian
b) not bother to avail yourself of the ample information already here, (as noted), which frankly speaks of entitlement - but we don’t spoon feed college kids who never learned how to do research here - ask specific questions and you’ll get specific answers
c) be so socially obtuse that you’d attempt to circumvent the purpose of a forum to ask for personal emails instead of seeing if anyone would even reply to you here as would nrmally be expected. Further, you
d) come here asking for handouts, while failing to provide anyone with any reason why they should bother to do so.
e) also fail to address, that by emailing you others would be exposing their personal email, which may be Googleable, ie personally identifying as yours was for you, and that we have no reason to trust you, your claimed persona or intentions
Given that you are very much not the first student I’ve seen on this or other subculture sites, and the others were attempting to gather data for papers, the association between ‘student’ and ‘spend your time emailing me your info for nothing, thanks’ has been made well ahead of your arrival.
This all came across as quite naieve to me, for various reasons I already explained - hence my explaining them.
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When I first clicked on this thread I was hopeful. I thought, great, we are all here to learn (else, why bother with this site at all.) But then I see this. I won’t go into my opinion on academia and research papers, or the fact that objective research isn’t really “objective.” It would just sound like a bitter rant from someone who didn’t go get a P.H.D.
So, anyway, to the original poster, go ahead, make an intro, and stay in the armchair if you like.
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