The Tumblr afterglow is starting to fade, and Yahoo is back to dumping money into oddball startups without any explanation. Why? Don't ask why.

TechCrunch reports the newest impulse buy is PlayerScale, a gaming firm that helps developers port their titles between platforms. Yahoo's reasoning on the buy is typically vague:

“The team has built an incredible gaming platform that is used by over 150 million players worldwide. We intend to continue to support and grow PlayerScale’s technology, and we look forward to building great new experiences on Yahoo! using the PlayerScale platform.”

The company's current gaming strategy consists of 90s hits like "Deep Sea Mahjong" and "Daily Crosswords." How will PlayerScale add to that? Is it not supposed to? Is Yahoo going to be a gaming company now, too? Is it going to integrate gaming with the other startups it's acquired, which deal in social networking, video chatting, news summarization, airline rewards, and public polling? Is this just going to be the Boxcar Children of technology? Are these companies being selected via some sort of Hunger Games death lottery? Will this mean Yahoo Mahjong for my iPhone?

Marissa. Marissa, are you there? Marissa...