Kyle Hill over at Scientific American’s Overthinking It blog breaks down what would happen if viewers drank a teaspoon of alcohol every time a lens flare appears on screen in Star Trek Into Darkness:

With so many lens flares, you’d be sipping on your drink about eight times per minute. At this rate, neither men nor women would make it out alive. But because body weight plays a big role in [blood alcohol content], men would at least make it past the first act before their breathing fails. Men make it 85 minutes before trekking into darkness while women only make it about half that. That’s what happens when you beam over five liters of alcohol into your system.

Jon de la Vega on his Github project page:

I like the look of Omnifocus 2 but it’s not ready for everyday use so I decided to make a theme for OF1 with the renewed look.

I’ve had access to the OmniFocus 2 “private test” for about a month, but right now it’s not usable on a daily basis (for me, at least). This theme really dresses OF1 up like OF2 in a way that is, surprisingly, nice. If you want to get a feel for where Omni is taking the design but retain the functionality you’re used to, this theme works quite nicely.

Caleb Crain at the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog:

…leaving the theatre after “Upstream Color,” I felt reasonably confident that I understood what had happened, plotwise. “But what’s it about?” my husband asked. I felt much less sure about that, but as I thought it over in the days that followed, and as I pulled a few transcendentalist classics off the shelf, I began to wonder if I’d been watching a movie by the premier Thoreauvian of our time.

This is easily the best piece of writing on Shane Carruth’s film yet.

Brooks Barnes, reporting for the New York Times, on Vinny Bruzzese’s screenplay data-crunching company:

For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success.

Used to be you got into the movie business to make movies.

Here’s a fun list I put together for GOOD. Spoiler: Rear Window took the top honor (duh).

This morning Stu Maschwitz announced Slugline, a Fountain screenwriting app. Slugline (check out the official site) has been in development almost since the earliest rumblings of Fountain. I have had the great privilege of using it throughout the beta, watching it grow into the powerful app it is today.

Slugline allows you to write in Fountain while making your script look like a formatted screenplay. It’s like Final Draft without all the headaches. It’s magic. And since your documents are always in plain text, you can take them with you anywhere.

I’ll be publishing a more detailed piece soon, so stay tuned. Slugline is on the Mac App Store For $39.99. You could buy it six times over and still be short of buying Final Draft. Go get it¹ and write a movie.

Welcome to Slugline from Slugline on Vimeo.

Brett Terpstra on the new update to his app, Marked:

You’ll also notice that Marked now shows up in “Open in” menus throughout the system. This will be handy with Ulysses 3, especially when working with “external sources.”

A few people noted this issue on Twitter and on my post detailing a Ulysses to Marked workflow. All should be well now.

If you write in Markdown you should own Marked. If you haven’t already, go grab a copy.¹

Nell Casey for Gothamist:

Perhaps because so many German immigrants settled in the state in the mid-19th century, Texas has a strong craft brewing scene and relationship to beer. Here are some of our favorite breweries we wish would distribute to New York City…

Suck it, NYC! Great list.

I joined my pals Ryan Gallagher and Josh Brunsting to talk about SXSW Film a month ago when it ended. The episode just went live. Give it a listen and relive the glory days of mid-March, 2013.

I love talking movies with these guys. Go give it a listen.

Let’s keep playing around with Ulysses III, shall we? I rather enjoy writing in it, and I like seeing the finished, formatted version of my work in Marked. I created some custom themes for Marked to match Ulysses’ color schemes (available for download at the bottom of this post). First, though, a few words on using Marked with Ulysses.

Here’s how The Soulmen answer “Is there a Markdown preview?” in their FAQ:

In External Sources, you can directly preview Markdown files. Right-click on a sheet and open it in your favorite Markdown processor. We can recommend Brett Terpstra’s wonderful Marked app for this.

As I said in my review, external sources don’t really offer you the full Ulysses experience. The product page is careful to mention that Marked is only supported with external sources, since they’re just loose documents on your hard drive; they would work with Marked no matter what. However, I can be less cautious: only external sources fully support Marked preview.

Full Marked support, by my measure, means the document will update live while you’re editing it. At present Marked does not support opening the raw text document at the core of your Ulysses sheet, so live updating is out.¹ You can, however, export the current sheet directly to Marked, where it will be formatted like any other Markdown document. You won’t be able to live update as you type, but you can manually push your edits to Marked.

All you have to do is access the quick export popover in the top right-hand corner of Ulysses. When you click it, select the text tab, then make sure you Markdown selected as your format. Hover over the “Open In…” button so a down-arrow appears just to the right of it. A list of available editors will pop down. Choose Marked.

Marked will open up your current sheet. Doing the same thing again will push any new edits to the document in Marked. The “Open In…” button will retain the previous app you used for quick export, which in my case will almost always be Marked. Now I can expedite pushing changes to Marked by hitting ⌘6 to bring up the quick export popover. If the middle button is highlighted blue and says “Open in Marked” all I have to do is hit return and it will push the changes. If not I can use directional arrows to move to the correct button.

This works on glued sheets as well. You can also highlight a bunch of sheets and do a quick export; Marked will see them as one long document, just as you see them in Ulysses.

In practice I rarely use live updating in Marked anymore. I only use it to read through longer pieces in a proportional typeface, to get myself in a proofreading mood. I’d like to see live Marked support come in a future update, but I’m perfectly happy knowing I can get to it from the keyboard in two clicks.

Now about those themes. My personal favorite is the Freestraction theme that ships with Ulysses. It’s easy on the eyes in both light and dark modes, so I decided to copy it for two custom Marked themes. Here they are:

Download Ulysses Themes for Marked

The following installation instructions are lifted right off of the Marked product page (at the very bottom):

1. Save the CSS file to a safe place such as ~/Library/Application Support/Marked/Custom CSS
2. In Marked Preferences, go to the Styles pane
3. Use the plus button to add a new style, locate your CSS file and hit “OK”
4. Your style will be named based on the name of the CSS file, and will now be available in the Style dropdown menus

Happy writing.

Further Reading:

• Marked as a CSS Playground
• Fountain for Marked