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07.1 8 .1 9

The world needs more penis drawings (really)

Do Not Draw a Penis is an interactive game, funded by Mozilla, that’s collecting thousands of drawing of penises to train AI. It sounds like a joke,
but it’s data the world could really use.

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1/8 [Image: courtesy Moniker]

BY M A R K W I L S O N
3 MINUTE READ

There are few moments in life when drawing a penis falls within the bounds of social acceptability. Unfixed potholes are an exception. And a new project
from the design firm Moniker another.

Do
Not
Draw
a
Penis is an interactive site that invites you to sketch a digital doodle, akin to Google’s Quick,
Draw! project, which tasked people with
drawing all sorts of objects, like houses and bikes, to train an AI to recognize such sketches. But Moniker’s drawing game has a caveat: It asks you
not to
draw a penis. So naturally, the first thing you’ll do is draw a penis. And once the site recognizes you’re drawing a penis—oh, and it will—it will either erase
your drawing, or subtly ridicule it. My drawings, I mean, my friend’s drawings, have been called everything from a wine bottle to a whale. “A very
authentic, average whale,” the site reads as it derides my sketches.

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[Image: courtesy Moniker]

The site is a pointed riff on Quick,

Draw!. Google eventually made that dataset of 15 million images public, intending to make the drawings available for
anyone to use. But as Moniker’s team notes, that dataset was missing one specific thing that people like to draw on the internet, and likely drew all over
Quick,
Draw!: Penises. “It is quite likely [Google has] a penis set. We know for a fact they chose not to include it in their release,” the team writes, with an
enticing whiff of conspiracy and noting that “at least one Github thread discussing the missing controversial categories is closed.” It appears Google may
have shut down the discussion about the missing penises in the data set. (I’ve reached out to Google to clarify and will update this post when I hear
back.) With Do
Not
Draw
a
Penis, Moniker has taken it upon itself to supply the missing data. In fact, the studio describes its site as “an appendix to the
Google Quickdraw data set.”

Moniker came up with the idea for the site over a year ago, and received a grant through the Mozilla foundation to build it. The three month project took
the team closer to twelve. Do
Not
Draw
a
Penis can recognize penises because Moniker recruited volunteers and hired individuals via Amazon’s
mechanical turk to draw 15,000 images, from flowers to penises, to train an AI of their own. (The team paid the artists Dutch minimum wage, they say, for
the efforts.) Through the finished site, Moniker will source more and more penises, too, which will inform its ever-growing, penis-laden public data set.
 
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

[Image: courtesy Moniker]

It’s a joke, sure, and it’s worth noting that Moniker has worked for Google in the past. Still, Moniker views the deletion or censorship of penises from
projects like Quick
Draw! as a “moral reality big tech companies are imposing on our global community.” It’s one thing to scrub penises from a social
network or public, all-ages website. It’s another to delete them from a data set used that could be used by developers, researchers, and computer
scientists to avoid the topic altogether.

Furthermore, penis sketch detection is a technology that we could really use. Earlier this year, when Nintendo launched a way for the public to create and
upload levels in to its popular game, Super
Smash
Bros., players immediately started building penis-themed levels. Nintendo had actually coded penis
detection into the level creator, it just didn’t detect phallic shapes well enough to stop them. As such, a relatively family-friendly game became something
loaded with overt innuendo. Nintendo’s human content oversight team could barely keep up with the penis trolling.

In other words, the world needs to draw penises if we don’t want to see penises everywhere well into the future. So go get drawing. If you want to see
what others have drawn—and why would you—there’s a playback-only version of the site here. And if you want to “support this cause,” Moniker has
released a tea towel featuring 5,000 of the penises users have submitted to the site so far. You can buy one here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company who has written about design, technology, and culture for almost 15 years. His work has appeared at Gizmodo, Kotaku, PopMech,
PopSci, Esquire, American Photo and Lucky Peach More

A DV E R T I S E M E N T

0 9. 2 0.1 9 12:00 AM

7 new incredibly useful things you didn’t know Gmail could do

Unleash your inbox’s inner genie with these easy-to-implement Gmail upgrades.
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

[Photo: Krsto Jevtic/Unsplash]

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


BY J R R A P H A E L
7 MINUTE READ

All right, I’ll admit it: I have a bit of a problem.

Most people pick an email service, set it up, and then use it—end of story. Me? I’m constantly fiddling with my inbox and working to find new tricks to
make it more efficient. It’s an obsession. And I can’t stop.

Can you really blame me, though? From scrutinizing Gmail’s settings to coming up with crafty ways to resuscitate abandoned features—sometimes even
concocting kooky hacks for making the most of simple-seeming elements like labels—there’s always some new virtual gem just waiting to be uncovered.

And when it comes to Gmail, the hunt for next-level efficiency hacks doesn’t even have to be limited to what Google itself provides. Powerful app-
connecting services like Zapier and IFTTT allow you to expand Gmail’s capabilities in some pretty impressive ways by bringing advanced yet effortless
forms of automation into your inbox. The only problem is that searching for worthwhile options within those sorts of services can be a time-consuming,
frustrating, and often ultimately fruitless journey.

Luckily, that’s precisely what I’m here for (the whole “efficiency obsession” thing—remember?). I scoured through hundreds upon hundreds of Gmail-
enhancing automation possibilities and found seven that stood out both for their usefulness and for the clever things they’re able to accomplish. They’re
all free, with one noted exception, and they’re generally quite simple to set up.

Read on, and see which superpowers seem properly suited for your
email environment.

1. CREATE A SUPER-FAST FORWARDING SHORTCUT

Do you find yourself frequently forwarding messages to the same people—your work team, your bosses, your family, or even yourself at an alternate
email address? Well, save yourself precious time, and set
up
a
two-click
shortcut
to
get
the
job
done.

First, go to Gmail and create a new label called “Forward.” The quickest way to do that is to open a message in your inbox, click the label icon at the top
of the screen, type the word “Forward,” and then hit Enter.

Next, open this Zap at Zapier and click the blue “Try It” button. The service will prompt you to sign in, if you haven’t already; make sure to use the same
Google account you use for your Gmail. Then, follow the “Advanced Mode” steps to set up the Zap with your “Forward” label as the trigger and “Send
Email” as the action—using your desired recipients in the “To” field, the Subject variable in the “Subject” field, the HTML option in the “Body Type” field,
and the Body HTML variable in the “Body” field. You might also want to put the From Name variable into the “From Name” field and the From Email
variable into the “Reply To” field so that your recipients can see the message’s original sender and reply directly to that person instead of to you.
It sounds like a lot, but don’t panic: Zapier walks you through every step of the setup and makes it as simple as can be.

Zapier will walk you through the process of configuring the trigger and action for your forwarding shortcut.

Once you finish and activate the Zap, all you have to do is assign any message in Gmail to your new “Forward” label—by selecting or opening it within

Gmail, clicking the label icon at the top of the screen, and then clicking “Forward” from the menu that appears—and just like that, the message will
 be sent out to everyone on your forwarding list.
automatically


2. AUTOMATE
 YOUR ATTACHMENT STORAGE
Maybe you have certain types of messages where attachments always need to be saved to a sharing-friendly cloud location—incoming invoices from
clients, reports or presentations from contractors, or whatever the case may be. Why not let Gmail handle the heavy lifting by saving
attachments
to
the
cloud
for
you?

Just set up this Zap for Dropbox or this Zap for Google Drive. Either one will let you specify a Gmail label to monitor, be it a label you’re already using for
the messages in question or a new one you create specifically for this purpose. And then, it’ll automatically save any associated attachments to the
storage service and folder of your choice.

With that one-time setup finished, all you have to do is add the label onto a message as needed—or better yet, create a filter within Gmail’s settings to
have the label added automatically based on something like the sender or the subject—and then rest easy knowing any attachments will land right where
you want ’em, without any effort or remembering required.

3. SEND STARRED SLACK MESSAGES TO GMAIL FOR SAFEKEEPING

The next time you see something in Slack that you want to save or be sure to remember, beam
it
on
over
to
your
inbox
simply
by
starring
it
in
Slack.

This Zapier Zap is the key to making it happen. Click the blue “Try It” button on the page and follow the steps to connect the service to your Gmail and
Slack accounts. After that, you’ll click through a handful of screens that’ll be preconfigured to do what you want, and then you’ll reach a point where you
can select exactly where your Slack-generated emails will go and how they’ll be presented. Be sure to put in your own email address and whatever
subject line you’d like and then to put the Text variable into the “Body” field.

Click all the way through and activate the Zap, and that’s it: Anytime you star something in Slack, it’ll show up in your inbox a few seconds later.

4. GIVE YOURSELF A HANDY EVERNOTE CONNECTION

Evernote adorers, take note: With a few minutes of painless planning, you can create a special label within Gmail and then have messages
assigned
to
it
automatically
synced
over
to
your
favorite
Evernote
notebook.

It’s the same basic concept from our first item, only now with Evernote as the destination. Just create a new label in Gmail for the purpose, set up this
Zapier Zap, and you’ll be good to go. (You can also use the starring
of a message in Gmail as a trigger, if you’d rather; use this
Zap if you want to go that
route.)

This connection can work both ways, too: With this Zap, you can instruct Zapier to email you (or anyone else) anytime a new note is added into a specific
Evernote notebook. I believe that’s what people with made-up job titles like “thought leader” call synergy.

5. SEE IMPORTANT TWITTER ACTIVITY IN YOUR INBOX

Constantly searching Twitter for specific name or keyword mentions can be a real hassle—so why not get automated alerts for whatever type of activity
you need to monitor? This Zapier Zap will let you specify a Twitter username or even a keyword and then get
ongoing
alerts
(to
you
and
to
anyone
else
you
want
to
include)
whenever
your
term
is
mentioned.

You can supplement that with a daily, weekly, or monthly digest, too—an easy way to stay on top of what’s going on without getting overwhelmed by
constant interruptions.

Note, however, that this Zap requires multiple steps of automation—which means, unlike the other items on this page, it requires a paid Zapier
subscription in order to operate. Zapier’s paid plans start at $20 a month for individuals and $250 a month for unlimited-user business accounts.

6. SYNC YOUR SMARTPHONE NOTIFICATIONS TO YOUR INBOX

Even in 2019, smartphone notifications are still vexingly ephemeral: If you swipe one away inadvertently or even just restart your phone while an alert is
still present, you’ll probably never see the notification again. So make sure you never lose track of something important by syncing
your
highest
priority
alerts
from
your
phone
to
your
Gmail
inbox.

This one’s available only to the Android-using folk among us: Just open this applet at IFTTT and click the big “Connect” button. The service will prompt
you to sign in and authorize it to access your account, if you haven’t already done that; just like with the other items in this list, make sure to use the
same Google account you use with Gmail.

After that, follow the steps that show up for configuring the connection—entering in the name of the app whose notifications you want to sync and
optionally a keyword that needs to be present in order for a sync to occur. For instance, you could enter “Google” for the app name and then “Assistant”
for the keyword, and you’d get email-based copies of all reminders and other Assistant-related alerts.

Finally, type in your email address (or any other address where you want the notifications to be delivered), and then click the “Save” button at the bottom
of the screen.


By thinking carefully about the app name and keyword you use, you can sync practically any sort of specific notification from your Android phone to your inbox for easy future

reference.


All that’s left is to install the IFTTT Android app on your phone, open it up, and follow the steps to sign in and grant it the necessary permissions. Then

just sit back and watch as any included notifications magically appear in your inbox moments after they pop up on your phone.

7. LET YOUR INBOX PREPARE YOU FOR PRECIPITATION

Last but not least, a handy
way
to
stay
ahead
of
the
weather: Connect this IFTTT applet, configure it for your location, and then get an email any night
when rain is expected the following day. You can even set it up for snow, if you want.

However you configure it, your inbox will effectively be transformed into your own personal forecaster—with alerts that’ll always reach you, no matter
what type of device you’re using or what apps you have installed.

For
even
more
next-level
Google
knowledge,
check
out
my
Android
Intelligence
newsletter.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JR Raphael is obsessed with productivity and finding clever ways to make the most of modern technology. Join him on Twitter or sign up for his weekly newsletter to get fresh tips
in your inbox every Friday. More

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