(YouTube Link)

If life decisions came with multiple choices, displayed via HUD and featuring options running the gamut of morality, we would probably still make terrible decisions. But hey, at least we’d know what our options were, and how effective our speech skill has become. While you’re at YouTube, check out Broken Pixel’s other silly comedy videos, and see what your favorite games would look like if they became all too real.

-via Destructoid

OkTrends has an intriguing post about sex compiled from the data from the bazillion interaction data of members of the OkCupid dating site (you can read all 10 interesting statistics), but this one is particularly intriguing: active Twitter users have shorter relationships.

People who use Twitter every day tend to have shorter relationships, and the problem gets worse as a person gets older, according to its analysis of 833,987 OkCupid users. The average relationship for an 18-year-old who uses Twitter is about nine months, while “everybody else” usually has a relationship average of nine-and-a-half months. At age 50, the frequent tweeter has a 15 month-long relationship, while the non-frequent Twitter user stays in a relationship for an average of almost 17 months.

Link

It used to be that couples lose romantic interest in each other after seven years of marriage. Thanks to modern life, however, the "seven-year itch" has been upgraded to the "three-year glitch":

The survey of 2,000 British adults in steady relationships pinpointed the 36-month mark as the time when relationship stress levels peak and points to a new trend of "pink passes" and "solo" holidays away from partners and spouses that many Britons resort to in order to keep romance alive.

"Longer working hours combined with money worries are clearly taking their toll on modern relationships and we are seeing an increasing trend for solo holidays and weekends away from marriages and relationships in order to revive the romantic spark," said pollster Judi James who oversaw the survey.

What are the top 10 passion-killers?

1. Weight gain/lack of exercise, 13 percent
2. Money & Spend thriftiness, 11 percent
3. Anti-social working hours, 10 percent
4. Hygiene issues (personal cleanliness), 9 percent
5. In-Laws/extended family - too much/too little, 9 percent
6. Lack of romance (sex, treats etc.), 8 percent
7. Alcohol - drinking too much, 7 percent
8. Snoring & anti social bedtime habits, 6 percent
9. Lapsed fashion-Same old underwear/clothes, 4 percent
10. Bathroom habits - Stray nail cuttings etc., 4 percent

Link

Before you download the next pop hit from iTunes, check whether it is hazardous to your health. A teen panel working with the Boston Public Health Commission has set up a "nutrition facts label" rating (like that seen on food items) for songs:

“Music, like food, can feed our brains and give us energy,” said Casey Corcoran, director of the Commission’s Start Strong Initiative. “But songs can affect our health and the health of our relationships.”

The tool, patterned after common food nutritional labels, invites consumers to become song lyric nutritionists by helping them identify relationship ingredients that make up a song. Using printed song lyrics as a guide, users can tally the number of healthy relationship themes, such as respect, equality, and trust, which are present in the song. And, like fattening calories, unhealthy relationship themes – possession, disrespect, and manipulation – are also counted. The number of times these themes are mentioned also factor into to the song’s total nutritional value. Corcoran recommends consuming lots of ‘healthy relationship’ ingredients for a balanced media diet.

The model was developed by 14 peer leaders in the Commission’s Start Strong Initiative. The teens, who range in age from 15 to 19 years old, attended a seven-week "Healthy Relationship Institute” where they were trained in teen dating violence prevention and healthy relationship promotion. They also learned to look at media critically, breaking it down to better understand the healthy or unhealthy relationship messages it may contain, such as power, control, equality, and gender roles.

“It’s important to have youth involved in this effort because teenagers are the main audience of the music,” said peer leader Shaquilla Terry, age 15 of Boston. “It’s important to actually listen to and think about the lyrics of a song and not just the beat.”

And which songs are (mentally) bad and good for you? Here are the Top 10 lists:

Top 10 Songs with UNHEALTHY Relationship Ingredients (2009)

Top 10 Songs with HEALTHY Relationship Ingredients (2009)

Official press release at the BPHC: Link

Christopher Baker analyzed some 60,000 emails that he has sent and received since 1998 to reveal his social network, as represented in an interesting visual map:

Like many people, I have archived all of my email with the hope of someday revisiting my past. I am interested in revealing the innumerable relationships between me, my schoolmates, work-mates, friends and family. This could not readily be accomplished by reading each of my 60,000 emails one-by-one. Instead, I created My Map, a relational map and alternative self portrait. My Map is a piece of custom designed software capable of rendering the relationships between myself and individuals in my address book by examining the TO:, FROM:, and CC: fields of every email in my email archive. The intensity of the relationship is determined by the intensity of the line. My Map allows me to explore different relational groupings and periods of time, revealing the temporal ebbs and flows in various relationships. In this way, My Map is a veritable self-portrait, a reflection of my associations and a way to locate myself.

Link