u/redtailforever

According to a source within the now defunct Misfits, the group has officially disbanded.

But don’t worry—the private-server era of Beyond the Map’s Edge is alive and well.

Rose has now started a new private, females-only server… and guess who has a seat inside?

Justin Posey.

I’m genuinely trying to understand the logic here.
After everything that happened with the Misfits—the questions about private access, information being shared behind closed doors, certain hunters potentially having access to Justin that the broader community doesn’t—the solution is apparently to dissolve that server and immediately create another exclusive private server where the hunt creator himself is a member.
And to be clear, the issue isn’t women having their own private server. Have at it. The issue is Justin being inside it while his treasure hunt is still active.

If this hunt is supposed to be an even playing field, why does the person who designed it continue hanging out in private spaces with select groups of active hunters?

Maybe absolutely nothing hunt-related gets discussed in there. Fine. But after all the controversy surrounding private access already, why even create that appearance of preferential access?

The Misfits may have disbanded.

The conflict-of-interest questions definitely didn’t.

Time the panels sat unreleased before I started asking questions: ~4 months

Time it took after I started asking questions: 6 days

Panels suddenly released: 2

Times I was insulted for asking about them: ___

Headspaces I’ve apparently been living rent-free in: Countless 😂

And naturally, the live had to open with a discussion about the “bullies” before playing the video.

Call it bullying, entitlement, harassment, whatever makes you feel better.

I call it results. 😂

You’re welcome, treasure-hunting people. 🫡

First and foremost, my thoughts are with everyone affected by these fires, especially the residents facing uncertainty and the firefighters and emergency personnel working on the ground. That seriousness is exactly why accuracy matters.

And after watching today’s exchange unfold, I think this has become a pretty clear example of a larger problem in this community.

Ema reported secondhand information that “Maverick is a loss” and “Elkhorn is a loss.”

Those words have an obvious meaning to most people reading them during an active wildfire: those locations have been lost to the fire.

K questioned that characterization and made a very reasonable distinction. If what was actually meant was that those locations were “a loss for fire personnel” because crews had been pulled off the sites, that’s materially different from saying:

“Maverick is a loss. Elkhorn is a loss.”

One describes firefighting resources being withdrawn. The other sounds like the locations burned.
K’s response was hardly some vicious attack:

“‘Are a loss’ makes it sound like the fire burned through there and they are gone. Just be precise if you’re going to attempt to help in these situations. Hype isn’t helpful.”

That was the off-ramp.

“Point taken. I should have been more precise. Sorry for the confusion.”

Done.

Instead, somehow K became the problem.
Ema repeatedly defended the information as something she was simply passing along, characterized the questioning as “policing” the thread and eventually said she would stop providing additional information because of K’s reaction.

Then Jam jumped in, called K’s responses “the troubling ones,” mocked her as some kind of “hero of information protection,” and suggested her criticism was causing people on the ground to stop sharing information.

And now we have perhaps the most important admission of the entire exchange.
Jam subsequently said:

“We posted information straight copy and paste from someone in the area… they messed up… it happens.”

Exactly.

It happens
.
That could have been the end of this entire situation.
Nobody expects Ema, Jam or their sources to have perfect real-time information during a rapidly changing wildfire. Sources can misunderstand things. Conditions change. People communicate poorly.

The mistake isn’t what bothers me.

The response to the mistake does.

Once Jam acknowledged that the source “messed up,” why was K unreasonable for questioning information that turned out to need clarification?

Why was her criticism deleted?
Why was she blamed for sources supposedly withholding future updates?

Why did asking for accuracy become something Jam said “we won’t tolerate”?

That’s where this stops being about a wildfire update and becomes another conversation about accountability and how criticism is handled in this community.

There is also an uncomfortable moderation issue here.
According to the screenshots, K objected that her response had been deleted while Jam’s critical response remained. Jam’s position was that he wasn’t allowing posts that discouraged people from providing updates.

But questioning the accuracy of an update isn’t the same thing as discouraging updates.

Good information should be encouraged. So should correcting bad or ambiguous information. Those principles aren’t in conflict.

And Jam eventually said something else that I think deserves attention:

“We run our site how we run our site. I think it is a damn good site. If people don’t like it honestly I don’t care anymore.”

That’s certainly their prerogative.
But THWU isn’t operating in a vacuum anymore.
Ema and Jam have become prominent figures in this community. They’ve organized Seekers Summit, conducted interviews, disseminated information to hunters and developed a significant working relationship with Justin Posey and the BTME ecosystem.

With increased influence comes increased scrutiny.
You don’t get to position yourself as a trusted source of community information and then tell people they “need to not worry about what people post” when they question whether that information is accurate.

And I’m seeing the same broader pattern repeatedly:

Criticism becomes “negativity.”

Questions become “attacks.”

Requests for accuracy become “policing.”

Requests for accountability become “entitlement.”

Then the conversation moves away from the substance of the criticism and toward the supposed attitude, motives or behavior of whoever raised it.

That’s backwards.

Amelda summed it up perfectly: K’s deleted comment was reasonable, and the response could simply have been:

“Point taken. We will do better.”

That’s accountability.

Accountability isn’t never making mistakes. It’s being able to acknowledge one without needing to discredit the person who pointed it out.

Nobody needed to be the villain here.
Nobody needed to be banned, silenced, blamed or portrayed as ruining the flow of information.

Someone questioned an alarming secondhand report.

The source was later acknowledged to have “messed up.”

That means questioning it was warranted.

So maybe instead of asking why K was being “negative,” we should be asking a much simpler question:

When did asking people to get the information right become the greater offense than getting the information wrong?

Because in a treasure-hunting community built entirely around scrutinizing information, challenging assumptions and figuring out what words actually mean, punishing people for doing exactly that seems particularly ironic.

The strangest part of this entire video situation is that Dan seemed genuinely unaware of how urgently people wanted the summit footage.

When people finally contacted him directly, he indicated that the videos were coming soon and seemed to believe everyone wanted a polished, cinematic final product. Meanwhile, most attendees simply wanted timely access to the information—especially before prime BOTG season.
That raises an obvious question: How did the person responsible for editing the videos have no idea what the community had been asking for over the past four months?

We were repeatedly told that Ema had been communicating with Dan and stressing how badly people wanted the footage. Yet Dan’s own reaction made it sound like the urgency had never been clearly communicated to him. Those two versions do not fit together.

Then, once people began contacting Dan directly and finally received an actual update, Jam stepped in to tell everyone not to rush or pressure him.
Why?

Was the problem really that people were bothering Dan, or was it that direct communication with him exposed how disconnected he was from the expectations being described publicly?

From the outside, it looks like Dan was thrown to the wolves. The organizers collected ticket money and sponsorships, chose to rely on a volunteer for an advertised part of the event, apparently failed to communicate a clear timeline or priority, and then allowed the community’s frustration to land directly on him.

Dan did not sell the tickets. Dan did not advertise that a video would be available shortly after the event. Dan did not create the no-recording policy. Dan did not decide to make the official footage the only way most attendees could revisit the presentations.
Those were organizational decisions.

Yet instead of acknowledging a management and communication failure, the narrative has shifted from:
“The videos are coming.”
to:
“Don’t pressure Dan.”
and now:
“Nobody was owed the videos anyway.”

That is why people are questioning the messaging. The explanation keeps changing after the fact, while Dan is left carrying the blame for decisions and expectations he apparently did not even fully understand.
At best, this was a massive communication failure. At worst, it looks like an effort to manage the narrative after direct contact with Dan revealed that the public explanation did not match what he had actually been told.

Either way, Dan should never have been placed in the middle and left to absorb the community’s frustration. Accountability belongs with the people who organized the event, controlled the messaging, and made the promises—not with the volunteer editor they left holding the bag.

Many of us paid to attend under the understanding that an official recording would be made available, and attendees were asked not to make their own recordings. We relied on that representation and gave up the opportunity to preserve the information ourselves. Months later, many attendees still don’t have access to content they reasonably expected to receive.
This isn’t about attacking the volunteer who agreed to edit the footage. It’s about the decisions made by the organizers. They collected ticket revenue, secured large sponsorships, and then chose to rely on someone volunteering their time to produce a key part of the event experience. That was their decision—not the attendees’. Telling paying attendees they should simply be grateful for the delay ignores that distinction.
I’m curious how many others feel they didn’t receive what they reasonably expected and would be interested in speaking with a consumer rights attorney to understand whether any legal remedies exist. I’m not saying anyone has already proven a case—I’m asking whether enough attendees want to have an attorney evaluate the facts.

If you’re interested, leave a comment or send me a message. If enough people were affected in the same way, we can organize, gather the relevant communications, and let a qualified attorney determine whether any claims are appropriate.

I’ve hit enough dead ends that I figured, why not throw the craziest coincidence I’ve found out there and let the hive mind take a swing at it.

Renumber the book so the dedication is page 5 instead of Roman numeral V. That makes Chapter 1 start on page 15.

Now remove every chapter whose pages contain a Niven (Harshad) number as one of the page numbers.

You’re left with exactly 42 chapters.

Then I ran the cipher from the beginning of the book and took the 20th letter from every 3rd paragraph (foot of three at 20 degrees).

The result is 42 letters that can be rearranged into:

“A glide up a holy Browns Canyon hides his Au harrier.”

* Au = gold.
* Harrier = hunting dog (and a Vizsla is a hunting dog).

Do I think this was intentional? I honestly have no idea.

But after staring at this book for so long, this was one of those moments where I just leaned back and said, “There’s no way…”

Maybe it’s pure randomness. Maybe someone else sees something I don’t. Either way, I’m tossing it to the community because I’ve officially entered the what if? phase of this hunt.

Tell me where I’m wrong—or tell me if this sent you down the same rabbit hole.

1. As stated by JP: “The cipher I designed was approachable. Six clock times, decoded into six letters”
2. As stated by JP: “The version that aired captured the same clock at two additional times. Cameras started rolling earlier than I had anticipated, the clock kept moving, and two extra positions got recorded.”
   Contradictions and elaborations: (Fun and Answers, anyone?)
   ⁃ 2a. supposedly the extra clock times just “slipped in”
   ⁃ 2b. we are assuming 4:02 is the one where “cameras started rolling earlier than he anticipated …”
   ⁃ 2c. what is the time in which the clock kept moving? Is it both? I thought the clock didn’t move, unless he moved it. There’s absolutely no way that all the dialogue at 4:19 or 1:33 or 5:26 fell within one minute of actual time. Which means, the clock was not moving.
   ⁃ 2d. most of the dialogue, in the 3rd episode of the series, from Justin was recorded at 5:26. And 5:26 sits equally next to 1:33 and 4:19 with the most amount of dialogue in the entire series. Why would he not set a time he had already applied to the cipher instead of 5:26? That was no accident, thus intentional. (Nowhere does he clarify if 5:26 was set as an obfuscation for the film crew. Which might be an understandable reason. Instead it’s just chalked up to an accident. “It slipped in.”)
   ⁃ 2e. The version that aired was not the intentional version. The intentional cipher had only 6 clock times. The “unintentional” and misleading cipher was intentional, because he knew that 5:26 was going to be included because of the content of the footage.
3. As stated by JP: “The version on screen was harder than the puzzle I had submitted, and I discovered the gap after the broadcast.”
   ⁃ 3a. complete contradiction to point 2d
   ⁃ 3b. He asked for and received a list of clock times included in the final cut from the producers before the series aired.
4. As stated by JP: “A red herring is a deliberate misdirection planted to lure solvers toward a wrong answer.”
   ⁃ 4a. Go back to 2 above … and reread subset till you are back here.
5. As stated by JP: “The two extra clock times were not planted or designed to mislead.”
   ⁃ 5a: a complete contradiction to point 2d: they may have not been designed to mislead or intentionally planted, but he knew immediately and for a year after the Netflix release that they were there and being acknowledged by searchers and were throwing everything off. Or so he claims.
6. As stated by JP: “in a medium where I do not control the recording start.”
   ⁃ 6a. He does control what time the clock is set to when he is being filmed.
   ⁃ Article 6 is a complete contradiction to point 2d.
7. As stated by JP: “A solver looking at eight letters with no signal that some were extraneous would naturally start by anagramming all eight. Nothing resolves.”
   ⁃ 7a. Without further instruction or clarity, no one would solve this within reason. Thus it is unreasonable to assume that anyone could be successful. Thus…
8. As stated by JP: “and at six letters or shorter, standard cryptanalytic tools (frequency analysis, quadgram scoring) provide no useful signal because the input is too short. That leaves manual anagram-checking as the only available attack, which is exactly the procedure that lands on MARGAY and stops.”
   ⁃ 8a. Article 8 is moot (aka. bs): Any anagram solver on the internet that uses proper nouns produces MAGYAR in the top ten responses, using any arrangement of those letters.
   THUS:
   He designed a cipher on 6 clock times to spell a 6 letter word. There were no intentional red herrings, yet a decision was made to keep the two extra clock times when he received the list from Netflix as well as when it aired. Thus he kept red herrings…intentionally…due to the fact that he didn’t want it solved right away … cont:
9. As stated by JP: “The series found its audience inside a week. Streaming hours climbed past thirteen million; total viewership ran into seven figures, and the active treasure-hunting cohort that emerged from it moved into six figures almost immediately. Broad public guidance after that point would have ended the puzzle for the field that was working it.” … and:
10. As stated by JP: “Even under aggressive conservatism, releasing the corrected version to a hundred-thousand-person cohort produces hundreds to thousands of simultaneous solvers within hours.”
    ⁃ 9/10a. What he is saying here is: he essentially intentionally mislead the entire hunt with red herrings, for a year, because he didn’t want the cipher solved in too short of a period of time after the hunt release.
    ⁃ 9/10b. See 2d again…and article 7.
    ⁃ 9/10c. Does anyone recall how few people were using the clock times as their cipher until he stated the clock times were part of the cipher? And many didn’t focus on it seriously until he ruled out the two clock times. Across public social medial channels there is no evidence of this type of cipher (BTME cipher process) being explored, and nearly nothing on the clock times being applied to a pigpen cipher.
11. As stated by JP: And…”There would have been no first solve to recognize, no team to credit, and no integrity to the outcome.”
    ⁃ 11a. So what?
    ⁃ 11b. See 9/10c: Letting the hunt progress naturally, though with the correct information available to the public at the onset would have been the upstanding thing to do. (Or pick a new cipher before this mess unfolded. In the thousands of failed attempts at this cipher, we gave you hundreds of successful ones.)

In a dimly lit room, the air was thick with sensual tension. Soft music played in the background, setting the mood for what was about to unfold. The dominant partner stood confidently, clad in leather, their eyes glinting with anticipation. The submissive partner, heart racing, felt a mixture of excitement and trepidation.

The scene began with light teasing—gentle caresses along the skin, soft whispers that ignited the senses. The dominant slowly introduced various elements of BDSM, showing the submissive the tools that would be used: a riding crop, gentle restraints, and a blindfold that promised to heighten every sensation.

As the dominant restrained the submissive, they emphasized trust, reminding them of the safeword that was agreed upon: “Magyar.” It was a word that held power, a lifeline in this world of pleasure and pain. The submissive nodded, feeling the thrill of anticipation mixed with the comfort of knowing they had control.

With each touch, the tension in the room grew. The dominant expertly alternated between pleasure and light pain, pushing boundaries while constantly checking in. The submissive's body responded, reveling in the sensations, the trust deepening with every moment.

Finally, as the dominant pushed just a bit further, they leaned in close, whispering in the submissive's ear, “What’s your safeword?”

With a playful grin, the submissive replied, “Magyar,” breaking the tension in the room. The punchline hung in the air, a reminder that even in the depths of desire, laughter and connection were paramount.

The scene transitioned from intensity to warmth, both partners sharing a moment of joy, knowing that their exploration was built on trust, consent, and a little humor.