Ah, Tumblr: the source of our hopes, dreams and nightmares.

Yet Tumblr's soon-to-be-parent company, Yahoo, invites only one thing: abject horror.

Apparently, Tumblr users are fleeing in droves upon hearing that the search giant is buying their haven for soap opera obsessions and anorexic horse pornography. From cnet.com:

Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg said his company saw a major uptick in Tumblr defections after news of the $1.1 billion acquisition by Yahoo came to light.

Writing on his personal blog Sunday evening, Mullenweg said that Wordpress usually imports 400 to 600 blog posts per hour from Tumblr. After news of the deal surfaced, the number of imported posts jumped to more than 72,000 blog posts in an hour.

Mullenweg updated his own blog post on Monday morning. "Some people are reading too much into the import numbers — I don't think there will be an exodus from Tumblr," he said, adding: "For most folks habits overcome internet-outrage. Even if a million people left, that's just about a week's worth of signups."

Tumblr should be fine — maybe. The deal, announced today, is just the latest of acquisitions made by Yahoo, which tend to result in terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad things happening to the things they purchase.

After the Ferris wheel rides, eating cotton candy and playing games at the fair, you might want to plop down on a bed for a rest. This year, you are in luck.

Reverie (www.reverie.com) introduced its "Made for Mobile" 7S bed and you can "rest-test" it at the fair. The hi-tech bed has an adjustable base with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And it's actually made in the U.S. at an update New York facility.

Here's more info from a press release. George Jetson would be proud.

Since recent studies show more American’s are working from bed, Reverie saw a good opportunity in the bedding space to introduce a revolutionary adjustable bed base that has capabilities any office would, but a lot more comfortable! The 7S adjustable base is the first bed to offer a remote control app for tablets and smartphones, available through Apple iTunes and Google Play. Easily use the app to put your head-up, feet down, opt for a massage or go into the ‘zero-gravity’ position! With wireless connectivity, the app will even let you control other appliances in the room — you can channel-surf on the TV, turn up the stereo or turn lamps on and off.

The fair runs through Sunday, April 28, at 11300 S. Houghton Road. For more info, visit www.pimacountyfair.com.

No matter how you spin it, staring at a computer for most of your day can be pretty rough. Sometimes, you just need to clear your head, particularly if you've been going through some hard times — say, if your NCAA bracket got busted because who the bloody hell actually expected Harvard, of all teams, to make past New Mexico?!

If you need to sit back, relax, and think a spell, take a look at the Thoughts Room, from the Quiet Place Project, one of a few different "quiet places" that Amitay Tweeto designed to give people a place to breathe on the internet:

one day, i woke up and told myself, "it can't go on like this."
there was too much noise coming from all the social media, the loud city, work, home, etc.
so i created the quiet place, just for me and my friends. i published the link to my 400 friends on facebook and twitter and then...

...it exploded.

But as cool as the Quiet Place is, the Thought Room is where it's at — it's the place for free association, typing out stress, and watching as your words fall away into space. Literally.

• the thoughts room
• WHY NO I DON'T HAVE ANYTHING I NEED TO TALK ABOUT

Seriously, it's kinda cool. And layering the soothing background music of the Thoughts Room with Rainy Mood (which we covered on the Range two years ago, strangely enough) is almost enough to help you forget about all the money you lost when you were expecting New F—king Mexico to Cinderella their way through the tournament.

Ahh, peace.

• This man will say horrible things to your friends for money.

Back? Okay. The reason this is even vaguely interesting is the link in the profile, which offers people the opportunity to purchase Tweets and have them broadcast to the followers of a particular account — in the case of YaBoyBillNye, that's about 450,000 new eyeballs who will see your purchased tweet.

YaBoyBillNye and other users of Pay4Tweet aren't the only folks in this "purchasing tweets" game — for one, you could look at the Twitter account of "the Greatest Iranian of All Time," professional wrestling legend, The Iron Sheik — and yes, this is among the least-offensive things I could find on his Twitter account, which is almost some kind of magical performance art:

I be in the New York in the April for the Wrestlemania you want to meet the legend let me know otherwise go fuck yourself forever

— The Iron Sheik (@the_ironsheik) March 20, 2013

For the low, low price of $30, you can ask The Legend to humble a friend, old country way, via Twitter:

Sheik has expressed that he would like to share his humbling to his fans. He is asking for a $30 fee in which he will verbally abuse the patron of your choice. You will leave it to him based on gender and time of day to put out the perfect message.

Apparently, paying others to tweet for you appears to actually be something that is catching on, putting an interesting spin on the concepts of both Sponsored Tweets and regular ol' advertisement Tweets, which have existed as long as Twitter has been a thing.

I have nothing against advertising, and I'll admit that I love the idea of having a celebrity/terrifying figure such as the Iron Sheik tweeting terrible things at my friends. But in the case of accounts such as YaBoyBillNye, there seems to be a kind of recursion effect: parodies promoting parodies in order to get promoted again by said parodies to make money off of the parodies.

The most recent thing posted on YaBoyBillNye's timeline was from a Kate Upton parody account that sends people to a collection of her photos — and presumably, rakes in the advertising dollars one would get from having the keyword "kate upton nude" on their site. There's nothing obvious about whether or not YaBoyBillNye is making money off of those tweets, but one would be a fool to think that someone who makes their money on the internet isn't attempting to gain something from these postings.

Honestly, the one thing I'm taking from this entire experience, other than the dawning, terrible realization that the Internet appears to be populated by stupid people, more and more each day — and that someone (such as David Orr) will always find ways to make money off of these idiots.

God bless 'em.

As if you didn’t already have enough nagging reminders out in the real world that you’re getting old, the Internet also has you covered: Twitter is celebrating its seventh anniversary this week, and shows no slowing of taking over the world, 140 characters at a time.

It all began on March 21, 2006, when Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent out this gem:

That twt - rather, tweet - birthed a social media revolution, pushing the site into top position as an online stream of consciousness for web-goers around the world. Now, for better or for worse, we’d be hard-pressed to envision a world free of inappropriate hashtags, passive-aggressive subtweets and wince-inducing interpretations of the verb “to tweet” (“What did you just twit?” is a frequent quote of older, Internet-challenged relatives).

Gawker Media's video game culture blog Kotaku has a tendency to go very, very broad with their coverage from time to time, stretching away from video gaming news, rumors, previews and reviews to deliver the occasional feature piece, such as a lengthy interview with an industry personality, an opinion regarding the role of video gaming within our lives, or (occasionally) something from way, way out of left field.

This is one of those left-field pieces.

One of the largest trends in video gaming as of late has been customization: the arenas you play in, the character you play as, or the items you use, with some games going as narrow as a character's emblem, and some going as broad as being able to create entire planets in your desired image.

The thing is, for a lot of people, that image tends to be a phallus. From Kotaku (note: the images in the link are NSFW):

There are, truth be told, better things a reporter can do with their time than to keep asking why people seem to love drawing dicks.

Nevertheless, I did inquire. A bunch.

"There are many different possible explanatory frameworks for considering this question: Freudian, Marxist, Feminist, Deconstructionist, Evolutionary-Psychologist, Existentialist, etc," game designer and head of New York University's game studies program, Frank Lantz, told me last fall when I began to interrogate the matter.

"You might as well use the question ‘Why do people draw dongs?' as a proxy for ‘Why are we here?' 'What is the good life?' ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?' or any other Big Philosophical Question."

We probably all have good guesses, right? People draw penises because they think it'll shock people or because it's one of society's few visual taboos and because they're not that hard to draw.

...

"Every time we've given people the ability to arrange things of their own-bread, ships-inevitably people want to leave a mark that people recognize," Ultima's lead creator Richard Garriott recently told me when he recently visited our offices in New York. That mark they leave, he said, is "not just something like ‘Killroy was here,' but something that was purposefully shocking or affronting. And if you're going to draw a purposefully affronting and shocking thing, a stick and balls is a pretty good easy basis to create a reaction."

The best part of the article isn't that it's about, well, dicks. It's that it makes an attempt to understand why people, from seemingly all walks of life, attempt to draw penises whenever they're afforded the opportunity to create images in a game, and looks at the topic from cultural, psychological and anthropological perspectives.

It's an interesting read covering an incredibly immature topic. Check it out, if you're so inclined. Just be warned: beyond that link, there are penises EVERYWHERE.

More often than not as of late, it seems like there are stories published regarding the terrifying nature of life on the Internet. In this case, Ars Technica looks into the phenomenon of people "hacking" other computers using remote administration tools to gain access to files, photos and webcams.

From Ars Technica:

The woman is visible from thousands of miles away on a hacker's computer. The hacker has infected her machine with a remote administration tool (RAT) that gives him access to the woman's screen, to her webcam, to her files, to her microphone. He watches her and the baby through a small control window open on his Windows PC, then he decides to have a little fun. He enters a series of shock and pornographic websites and watches them appear on the woman's computer.

The woman is startled. "Did it scare you?" she asks someone off camera. A young man steps into the webcam frame. "Yes," he says. Both stare at the computer in horrified fascination. A picture of old naked men appears in their Web browser, then vanishes as a McAfee security product blocks a "dangerous site."

"I think someone hacked into our computer," says the young man.

Far away, the hacker opens his "Fun Manager" control panel, which provides a host of tools for messing with his RAT victims. He can hide their Windows "Start" button or the taskbar or the clock or the desktop, badly confusing many casual Windows users. He can have their computer speak to them. Instead, he settles for popping open the remote computer's optical drive.

Even over the webcam, the sound of shock is clear. "Stay right here," says the woman.

"Whoa!... the DVD thing just opened," says the young man.

The hacker sends the pair a message that reads "achoo!" and the young man laughs in astonishment. "Disconnect from the Internet," he says. "Your laptop's going to go kaboom next."

As a side note, this is the second story regarding webcam "hacking" (for lack of a better shorthand) I've seen in the last year from a fairly major news outlet — in GQ's January 2012 issue, they told the story of Luis Mijangos, who spent a significant amount of his time hacking and building RATs for other people to use.

Today in Awesome Hacks of Classic Video Games, programmer/cool father Mike Mika reprogrammed Nintendo's classic Donkey Kong, switching the roles of the game's protagonist, Mario (then known as "Jumpman" for all you gaming history nerds), with his damsel-in-distress, Pauline. Above is gameplay from the first four levels of the revised DK, culminating in Pauline besting the big ape.

From Polygon:

"My three year old daughter and I play a lot of old games together," Mika wrote in the video's description. "Her favorite is Donkey Kong. Two days ago, she asked me if she could play as the girl and save Mario. She's played as Peach in Super Mario Bros. 2 and naturally just assumed she could do the same in Donkey Kong. I told her we couldn't in that particular Mario game, she seemed really bummed out by that."

So Mika put in the time to draw and insert new frames and swap the characters out. The result: a kick-ass, gender-equality statement—or, his daughter's new favorite heroine.

That's Gaming Dad of the Month material right there.

That is, if a Croatian programmer is able to work out the kinks in his experiment.

From The Next Web:

Responsive design has recently become a buzzword, and for good reason: it captures the idea of displaying your content beautifully on each and every device. Responsive typography has also received attention, and various techniques have emerged to encourage type legibility across devices: like displaying different font weights to compensate for Retina displays.

Now, an experiment by web designer Marko Dugonjić has taken the concept of responsive typography to a new level: using face detection, Dugonjić calculates the proximity a user is from his or her screen, and then adjusts font size accordingly.

Of course, this isn’t an exact science; there are varying opinions on how large body type should be for proper legibility, and the eyes of the user plays an important role (that’s difficult to calculate).

The crux of this, however, comes from the demonstration GIF posted by TNW, which shows the text decrease in size as the user's face gets closer to the screen.

To check out the GIF, and learn more about the weirdness/coolness of this facial detection, check out The Next Web.

This should go without saying, but some online gamers are weird.

According to video gaming blog Kotaku, a Mr. Feng, of China, was concerned with the time his unemployed 23-year-old son was spending playing various online role playing games instead of looking for work—so concerned that he hired players to track down his son's characters in his favorite games, and gank (kill) the hell out of them.

From Kotaku:

Feng's idea was that his son would get bored of playing games if he was killed every time he logged on, and that he would start putting more effort into getting a job.

Despite being sick of getting killed every time, Xiao Feng [Mr. Feng's son] decided to stick up to his father and tell him how he felt. He was quoted as saying, "I can play or I can not play, it doesn't bother me. I'm not looking for any job—I want to take some time to find one that suits me."

Given this turn of events, Mr. Feng is said to be "relieved," though it's not clear whether or not he's called off the cyber hounds.

Either way, best of luck to Feng, Jr. for his job search, and to Mr. Feng for his potentially lucrative new industry that he's developed.