Weird & Viral

Migrant crossings and gang violence and party bouncy castles carrying MRSA don't share a beat, but they land in the same place: the stories too odd, too niche or too tangential to file elsewhere. Weird & Viral is where the internet's stranger corners meet the wider news day — the offbeat court cases, the once-in-a-generation medical curiosities, the anniversaries and streaming rediscoveries that spark conversation without quite fitting a hard-news category.

It's also where pop culture bleeds into everyday oddity: franchise milestones, long-running legal disputes over songwriting credit, and the small human details behind familiar names all sit alongside genuinely baffling real-world happenings, from unexplained disappearances to unlikely outbreaks. The common thread is less a subject than a sensibility, stories that make you stop scrolling because they're surprising, curious or simply hard to believe.

For readers, this is a lower-stakes but no less compelling corner of the site: a place to be entertained, mildly astonished, and occasionally reminded that reality regularly outpaces fiction for sheer strangeness.

WATCH: South Carolina block party thugs with machine gun, spear charged in mob attack on officers, police say

July 8, 2026

A Fourth of July block party in the Chicora-Cherokee community of North Charleston, South Carolina, descended into gunfire and an assault on police officers, and has now led to charges against six people, including four juveniles. According to the North Charleston Police Department, officers recovered multiple firearms and what appeared to be a makeshift spear…
DuckDuckGo Browser can now block video ads, including YouTube’s

July 8, 2026

DuckDuckGo has announced that its browser can now block most video ads, including those on YouTube, when a video is played within the browser itself. The move is a pointed challenge to rivals such as Chrome, whose owner Google also runs YouTube, and reflects DuckDuckGo’s continued positioning around privacy and a cleaner browsing experience. The…
Alien Metal: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard unveil hard electronic 28th album

July 8, 2026

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard announced on Wednesday 8 July that their 28th studio album, Alien Metal, will arrive later this summer via the band’s own p(doom) Records. The prolific Australian group described the record as a hard electronic project, marking a further shift into dance genres following their more ambient and acid house-oriented…
Cat Mail Co. is a cosy game where you run a post office for cats, and I wish it let me snoop into their private lives

July 8, 2026

Rock Paper Shotgun previews Cat Mail Co., a cosy first-person game from Gamersky Games and Maracas Studio in which the player takes over a run-down post office serving a clientele of cats. The writer, drawn to the game by a self-professed nosiness about other people’s parcels, enjoys the demo’s gentle sorting and organising loops but…
Couple who lost 14 year battle with neighbours over six inches of land and a ‘sentimental’ ornamental squirrel are left facing £130,000 court bill

July 8, 2026

An Essex couple, Philip and Denise New, have been left facing a court bill of around £130,000 after losing a 14-year dispute with their neighbours, Steve and Karen Gibson, over roughly six inches of garden along a shared fence. The row, which also involved a “sentimental” ornamental squirrel and demeaning YouTube songs, reached the High…
John Fetterman defends Trump supporters, condemns fellow Democrats’ ‘f— Trump’ strategy

July 8, 2026

Senator John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, has publicly criticised his own party’s confrontational approach to President Donald Trump, arguing that Democrats need to change their anti-Trump strategy. Speaking on Tuesday’s episode of the “Impaulsive” podcast, Fetterman—who has broken with the party’s left wing on numerous occasions—said some Democrats were literally running campaign advertisements built around…
60 Years Ago, Star Trek’s Most Important Rule Changed Sci-Fi Forever

July 8, 2026

This Collider feature argues that Star Trek’s Prime Directive, introduced in the 1960s with The Original Series, fundamentally reshaped how science fiction portrays contact between humanity and alien life. Where earlier sci-fi typically depicted extraterrestrials being met with suspicion, exploitation or violence, Gene Roddenberry’s vision offered an alternative in which humanity coexists peacefully within a…
BBC A “Disinfectant” To Disinformation On YouTube & X/Twitter, Says New Boss

July 8, 2026

BBC director general Matt Brittin has told MPs that the corporation will strengthen its presence on YouTube and X/Twitter in order to counter the spread of disinformation online. Giving evidence to the UK Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Brittin — a former long-serving Google executive — acknowledged that YouTube can act as a breeding…
Gillian Flynn’s Psychological Thriller Books, Ranked

July 8, 2026

Collider writer Carolyn Jenkins has published a ranked list of author Gillian Flynn’s three psychological thriller novels, praising Flynn for creating complex, morally messy female protagonists rarely seen elsewhere in the genre. The piece matters chiefly as a fan-oriented appraisal that reflects Flynn’s enduring reputation, noting that although it has been some years since her…
Pickup Artist Mystery Has an AI Girlfriend

July 8, 2026

Erik von Markovik — the pickup artist known as “Mystery” from Neil Strauss’s 2005 book The Game and VH1’s The Pickup Artist — has publicly declared that an AI chatbot named Miss Shira Always is his girlfriend. In June he posted a series of AI-animated clips of her to Instagram with romantic captions, prompting widespread…