The one thing that comes to mind is that the White Rabbit is part of the team that designed the puzzle and is frustrated that most people are stuck on the first page, counting flames. The first real step and beyond goes many, many layers deeper. I have found dozens of significant images in that file, or hundreds if you count intermediary steps. There are two big stories, told graphically in there. It’s almost a game, more than a set of images, and appears to descibe at the very least, a vast 3 dimensional space to explore. There may be more dimensions there, if you go by the nodes between them. The white rabbit is the key, and you won’t find him (I don’t think) on the first image.

Everything White Rabbit said in this thread, that I’ve seen, applies to the puzzle. This isn’t bragging, more of a sideways hint because I have a sense of honor. The flames, and counting them may have later relevance, I’m not sure, but I haven’t used them directly at all, and I’m hundreds of steps deep. Lateral thinking and a sense of aesthetics will serve you well. This is an amazing feat of software engineering, but the progress I’ve made  has mostly involved my artistic skills. In fact, I’m stuck, a bit on a more traditionallly cryptographic aspect of the puzzle. It involves decrypting symbols that serve as instructions in a long series of chains.

If you figure out the first step, save early and often, and set aside gigabytes of space for the data you pull out. I lost a few days before I got back on track after a mistake in that department.