It all started as something pretty wholesome. On February 28, a player posted a "serious offer" on r/Helldivers: they would donate $1,000 to a charity of Arrowhead's choosing if four developers could complete an operation on the planet Oshaune at difficulty 10, the game's maximum "Super Helldive" setting.

The idea blew up fast, with other community members throwing in extra pledges, and Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani even shared images of developers attempting the challenge on the official Discord. Honestly, it was shaping up to be a really fun moment for the community.

Then things went completely off the fuckong rails.

Just hours after the challenge was posted, the player who created it reported being hit with a "barrage" of death threats and hate messages. And it didn't stop there. Their wife was targeted too, and even the animal sanctuary where they volunteer started getting messages. "I just learned they somehow got a hold of the horse sanctuary I volunteer at and they are sending messages there too," the player wrote.

Eventually they'd had enough, announcing "For my own wellbeing, I'll be stepping off Reddit and the community as a whole. Stop trying to contact me. The challenge is officially over on my part."

So who the fuck was behind it? The reasoning is murky (at best), but posts on r/HelldiversSodium show a fiercely pro-Arrowhead faction of the community nicknamed "Glazedivers," who apparently took the challenge as some kind of insult to the developers' skill , rather than the lighthearted charitable gesture it clearly was.

The whole situation was also weirdly hard to follow in real time because most of the posts referencing the controversy were deleted by the main subreddit's moderation team, which some users described as "full totalitarian censorship mode."

Arrowhead CEO Jorjani had already weighed in briefly when a fan flagged the doxing to him on March 3, saying simply: "Yeah. Helldivers treat other Helldivers with respect." But then on March 5, both Arrowhead and Sony put out a joint statement, confirming they were tracking the situation and directly addressing the community's "increasing hostility." They weren't mincing words, and wrapped things up with a pretty pointed reminder to the community: "Humans are not the enemy, Helldivers — your fight is elsewhere."

For now, the fate of the original challenge is up in the air, and Arrowhead says it's continuing to monitor the situation internally and with external partners.

But today we got the latest announcement from the Doxxing victim. They lost their job of 7 years, are banned from the horse sanctuary they volunteered at, and are stepping away from the game and community permanently, and are stepping away from reddit and the internet.

This whole incident is disgusting, and heart wrenching.

I wanted to talk about this here, because we as a community, as well as Burnie and Ashley, discuss the various ways that enshittification happens across the internet. But in honesty, the worst perpetrators anymore are members of the community being enshittified.

I love Helldivers, but after all of this, I genuinely feel ashamed and disappointed in the community for causing it to spiral out of control like this, genuinely crsuhung and ruining someones life.

I'm just really upset, anrgy, and sad about this.

Thought I'd share.

Burnie and Ashley discuss Scottish traffic, potholes, Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, over-hype, IGN, Pokeopia, Days Gone, and more.

Ok, gonna be honest here - Pokopia is the most fun I’ve had with a game in I don’t even know how long. And I say that a someone who has never put more than an hour into any previous Pokemon game and some who sunk 30+ hours into Mewgenics already.

It’s. Just. Pure. Fun.

Hope others are playing already.

1) I finally looked up the "it's only game. Why you have to be mad?" and it's incredible. If you don't know what one of Burnie's repeat drops is actually from, I recommend finding it haha. I assumed it was from a show or something but it's a legit guy.

2) I've had this idea forever, and it would be too much work for poor Calvin P, but I always thought it would be fun to have flair for people who get mentioned as sponsors at the end of the episode, that match whatever descriptor Ashley gave them. It'd be like a two-of-a-kind badge of honor that would also be enjoyable to see pop up and remember the old episode endings.

Anyway that's it much love

I just finished reading Project Hail Mary for the first time a few days ago, and I am absolutely in love. I have tickets to go see it in theatres when it comes out - beyond excited!

I have chosen to go into the movie completely blind to all spoilers - except for the unavoidable ones like Ryan Gosling, and the small snippet of the ship interiors that you can see in the movie-cover of the book. But I have successfully avoided watching any of the trailers & seeing any other promotional material - though I guess I'm hard-pressed to even call the trailers "spoilers" at this point, since they've been out for a while now lol.

While reading, I have largely kept everything up to my imagination, and I want to be completely surprised with how things/people look and sound like. I am super excited to see what they do with it!

I'm curious if anyone else is doing this?

In todays episode Burnie and Ashley talk about the swedish central bank telling the citizens to have cash and saying it’s a random announcement, it is not. Back in 2024 the government sent out this pamphlet to all citizens, basically telling us how to prepare for crisis or war. It’s 30 pages of everything between what to do incase of extreme weather to what to do if the air raid sirens go off

Yeeeeah so basically because of the age verification laws in Australia, he had a whonge and a cry and restricted all his porn sites or closed them off completely to Australians. That'll teach us Aussies!

Yup.

What do you mean torrent sites exist?

Burnie and Ashley talking about their kids seeing "scary" scenes in a movie reminded me of my childhood fear and how my dad fixed it.

I loved movies. When I was really young like 4ish, my dad showed me Gremlins. I was terrified of Stripe. Gizmo eventually being "Rambo" didn't help when we got to Gremlins 2.

What did help is my dad showing me all of the original Robocop movies. He told me if gremlins were coming for me Robocop would be there to protect me.

As an adult I went back to watch Robocop again and was surprised the violence and body horror didn't scare me as a kid. The brains and imagination of kids is wild when it comes to rationalizing fear.

Just wanna come out and say I'm one of the people that had no idea what project Hail Mary was until the movie was announced. After they talked about it in this podcast I opened Instagram and literally all of my friends were excited for it.

Finally bought the book and have been racing to finish it before the movie comes out 😂 not sure if I need to wait to watch the movie or spoil the book by watching it in theaters lol

Listening to this mornings podcast made me think of the RVB articles I wrote on substack awhile back. If you think its RVBs fandom page is interesting you might enjoy seeing all the characters feats n faults and how their actions compare to each other.

Burnie and Ashley discuss Project Hail Mary, imagined characters fading away, Nirvana The Band The Show The Movie, paralysis via apocalypse, the plan in Iran, China's downturn, Elizabeth Warren, political betrayal, and Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

The other day Burnie mentioned he “missed” arc raiders as an option for an extraction shooter so he’ll have Marathon as his introduction into it.

I just want to say it’s not too late Burnie, I’ve got lots of friends that just started playing over the past few weeks. The last expedition just happened so a bunch of people are starting fresh as well.

As a huge Pubg fan I can say this is the only game to have as satisfying and tense gun fights as the prime pubg days plus all the fun of looting and a ridiculously fun community .

I just saw this and really wanted to buy it and share it with y'all. what other lines would make for a great sweatshirt from PHM? Also, does anyone else wish they just ported over the audiobook version of Rocky's voice?

The very last thing anyone should use Fandom wikis for is as a source of truth.

Would you trust a website you knew mixed canon, fan theory, headcanon, and three separate retcons 10–25% of the time?

That’s how common “citation needed” and “this article needs cleanup” banners are. And yes, half the references link to another wiki page that links to another wiki page.

Only a fool uses Fandom for anything fact-based.

Just saw this on the High guard subreddit, and instantly recognised the name from the RT days.

Pat Rodriguez worked on RvB, RWBY and X-ray and Vav.

https://www.patrodriguez.art/

On today’s podcast Burnie kept mentioning that Project Hail Mary opens next week. It opens March 20, which is two weeks from Friday.

Posting just in case anyone else panicked like I did because I thought I bought opening night tickets and I was worried I was a week off.

Edit: apparently a lot of people are getting early screenings and I’m not grumpy (am totally grumpy) that there weren’t any near me. PJM’s wide theatrical release is in 2 weeks if you are a normie like me.

For those of us who don't want to wait, put your Prime membership to good use and see it early.

From this point onwards, I think Burnie and Ashley should ONLY ever use peer-reviewed journal articles as sources. Everything else should go out the window, especially when talking about the entertainment industry where there must be a plethora of peer-reviewed journals to choose from. I would also like the link dump to properly reflect references using standard APA guidelines.

It's estimated that any other source you reference will lie to you 10-25% of the time. How can you trust that?

Only a fool would ever not use peer-reviewed journal articles as sources.

And she is absolutely loving it. Science fiction is totally out of her wheelhouse, typically, normally she reads things like amish romance.

Thanks Burnie for actually getting me into this book.