Is this how all relationships work?

ME: I mean, if we’d moved in together in our 30s, you would probably have left me, because I’m horrible.
NICK: True.
ME: But we were young, and you put up with me, and I got better.
NICK: You have got a lot better.
(Pause)
ME: I don’t like you.
NICK: I’m going to blow my nose.

These photos are the result of my belated discovery of the “colour accent” feature on my camera, which allows me to accent a specific colour in an otherwise black-and-white photograph.

With this function, I hope to one day make my fortune producing Hallmark cards.

I present them in honour (also belated) of the first book of Jasper Fforde’s new Shades of Grey series, which I hope to be able to wallow in at some point in the not-too-distant future.

We only have these conversations when I’m marking.

ME: Would you say “Count both Nick and me in” or “Count both Nick and I in”?
NICK: “Count us both in.”
ME: I was asking a specific question.
NICK: Oh. “Count both Nick and . . . me in?”
ME: Perfectly correct.
NICK: Ah, I see. You were testing me.
ME: And the reason we use the objective pronoun case is . . . ?
NICK: You give me a biscuit?

Talking Wii Fit. Again.

ME: How was your age and your weight?
NICK: Actually, down a bit.
ME: How much?
NICK: 0.4 of a kilo.
ME: That’s the same amount of weight as I gained. This can’t be a coincidence.
NICK: Why can’t it?
ME: You’re stealing my weight loss! You transferred 0.4 kilos of your weight to me as I slept!
NICK: That’s so gross.
ME: Why?
NICK: Well, how would I do that?
ME: Black magic.
NICK: Oh. Well, that’s okay, then.

I’ve only just this minute realised I didn’t mention the season for the last live-blogging. How dodgy of me! Still, all corrected now.

And here we are for episode two of season five. We begin by zooming in on a city, a city balancing on the back of an enormous spaceship. Portions of the city are labelled “Devon” and “Surrey.”

Inside one of the buildings, we see children lining up in front of their preceptor, an academic-robed robot in a glass box, like the fortune tellers on the piers, whose smiling face turns around to show a frown as he says Timmy has received a zero.

Timmy’s friend Mandy tells him he can’t ride the elevator with a zero, but Timmy says it’s twenty decks to London, and he won’t walk. He climbs into a lift, but there’s another preceptor—let’s just call them Smilers from the start—in there, whose smiling face turns to a frowning one as a small girl on the viewscreen recites doggerel about the “beast below,” and then turns again to show an even more frowning face as Timmy falls through the bottom of the lift into the depths of the city.

Credits.

After the credits, we see Amy floating outside the TARDIS, held by the Doctor’s grip on one ankle (and still in her nightie), telling us about her imaginary friend who came back the night before her wedding.

Below them is the pre-credits spaceship, which the Doctor tells us is the remains of the U.K., after solar flares destroyed the Earth.

He calls Amy “Pond,” and tells her that he’s found her a spaceship.

The Doctor tells her that the one rule is that they never interfere: Amy, watching a distressed child—Timmy’s friend Mandy—on the viewscreen—wonders if it’s like nature documentaries, where they film, but don’t interfere. Isn’t that hard? she wonders out loud, as she sees that the Doctor isn’t behind her, but is consoling the child.

He asks Amy what’s wrong with the spaceship, but she’s temporarily confused by the fact that she’s in her nightie. He tells her it’s all sweetness and light on the surface, but really it’s a police state—then he grabs a glass of water and puts it on the deck.

AMY: Why did you just do that with the water?
DOCTOR: I don’t know. I think a lot. It’s hard to keep track.

They’re distracted by a crying child, but behind them a mysterious man in black—let’s just call him a Winder from the start—follows them, and rings another mysterious man. Second mysterious man in turn rings a woman in a long red-velvet robe, who asks if they’re sure that the Doctor did the thing with the water. They’re sure—and she picks up a white porcelain mask, and leaves, stepping carefully past a series of glasses filled with water.

The Doctor repeats that this is a police state, and points out how clean the Smilers’ booths are compared to the rest of Oxford Street. (He also indicates that he has children, but doesn’t answer Amy’s direct question on the subject. Has he ever answered a direct question on the subject?)

Amy follows Mandy, after being taunted by the Doctor about heading back to her tiny village, and the Doctor says he’s going to do what he’s always done—stay out of trouble, badly.

Mandy, who is annoyed when Amy catches up with her, says they can’t keep going that way—there’s a hole in the road. But Amy insists on picking the locks. As she does so, she chats about being Scottish (they aren’t on this ship: they wanted their own. “Good for them,” Amy says. “Nothing changes.”) and about getting married “a long time ago tomorrow morning.”

But as she picks the locks, Mandy refuses to go through with her, and a Smiler in the background turns to his frowniest face.

Inside the tent Amy’s been picking the locks to is an undulating tentacle of some sorts. Amy freaks and backs out, only to find herself surrounded by Winders, who gas her into unconsciousness.

The Doctor, elsewhere, is confronted by the red-velvet woman, now with the porcelain mask on, who tells him he’s stumbled across “the impossible truth.” Having tested things with the glass of water, he’s headed down the engine room, to find that by all accounts, there’s no engine at all.

How is this possible? the Doctor wonders.

The woman doesn’t know.

WOMAN: Help us, Doctor. You’re our only hope.
ME: Ha!

The Doctor asks who she is and how he’ll find her again. She says she’s Liz 10, and she’ll find him.

She walks off.

Amy wakes up in Voting Booth 330C. A disembodied voice tells her that a documentary about Starship U.K. will start shortly, once they verify her status on the electoral roll.

A white-bearded man tells her that she has two options after she sees the documentary: she can “protest” or “forget”. There are two buttons with these labels in front of her. He warns her that if only 1% of people protest, the programme will be discontinued, and everyone will die.

MAN: Here then is the truth about Starship U.K. and the price that has been paid for the safety of the British people. May God have mercy on our souls.

We don’t see the documentary, because it flashes through too fast, but Amy staggers after seeing it and hits the “forget” button almost without thinking. As she does, her own face flashes up on the screen, telling her that this isn’t a trick, that she needs to find the Doctor and get out of here.

The door to the booth slides open and the Doctor pokes his head around the door, asking what she’s done.

Amy doesn’t know why she would agree to forget, and the Doctor points out that he can’t even see the film, because the booth doesn’t register him as human.

AMY: You look human.
DOCTOR: No, you look Time Lord. We came first.

Amy asks if there are other Time Lords, but the Doctor says no: there were, but they’re all gone now. Then he says he’d love to forget, but he doesn’t, because this is what he does—brings down governments.

And he hits the “protest” button.

Both he and Amy slide down into the depths of Starship U.K. as the Smiler in the booth turns around to his frowniest face.

Outside, Mandy is confronted by Liz 10, who says, “Don’t worry, love. It’s only me.”

DOCTOR: Can’t be a cave. Looks like a cave.
AMY: It’s a rubbish dump. And it’s minging.

But it’s neither: it’s a mouth. And there’s really only one way to get out of a mouth.

DOCTOR: Right then. This isn’t going to be big on dignity.

Yes, that’s the sort of thing I don’t want to see while I’m eating dinner.

But though they’re vomited out, they can’t get out without hitting the “forget” button, and they won’t. The Doctor challenges the two Smilers, telling them they’re useless—but they stand up out of their booths, which the Doctor clearly wasn’t taking into account.

Liz 10 turns up and shoots them both, before twirling her guns and re-holstering them.

LIZ 10: No. Never voted, never forgot. Not technically a British subject.
DOCTOR: Then who are you?

Liz 10 tells him she was brought up on the stories of the Doctor: old drinking buddy of Henry 12, and so much for the Virgin Queen.

DOCTOR: Liz 10!
LIZ 10: Elizabeth the Tenth. And down!

She shoots the two self-repairing Smilers.

LIZ 10: I’m the bloody queen, mate. Basically, I rule.

They head up, past more of the tentacles that Amy saw above. But as they move, the mysterious man to whom the Winders were talking earlier realises that they have to initiate the protocol, because the queen has penetrated to the lower levels.

In the queen’s rooms, she tells them that she’s been queen for ten years, and that she’s slowed her body clock, to keep herself looking like the stamps.

But before the Doctor can explain the significance of the porcelain mask that Liz 10 wears, Winders burst in and arrest them all on the strength of the highest authority. Liz tells them that’s she’s the highest authority, and they say, “Yes, ma’am.”

The Winder’s head swirls on his neck, to show a Smiler’s frowny face.

He escorts them all to the Tower, where Liz 10 greets “Hawthorne,” who tells them that the creature to whom dissenters are fed won’t eat children.

So we have the queen, Hawthorne, Mandy, Amy, the Doctor, some dissenting children—and an exposed brain, being burned with bolts of lightning.

It’s a creature, the creature who keeps the ship running, provided that it’s tortured and prodded.

HAWTHORNE: We act on instructions from the highest authority.
LIZ 10: I am the highest authority.

She insists that they’re to release the creature, but the Doctor points out that her mask is not ten years old—and neither has she been on the throne for ten years. More like two hundred, the Doctor says—two hundred years in ten-year increments, always the same ten years.

Always, he says, leading her here—and he escorts her around a corner, to where a video screen shows her own face, explaining that the last of the star whales came out of the sky like a miracle as their children screamed and the skies burned. They trapped it, they built their ship around it, and they rode it to freedom.

Liz 10 tells herself that she has two options: to forget and “become again the heart of this nation” or to abdicate, which will release the star whale and destroy the ship.

Amy asks why she would forget this, and the Doctor says to save him from an impossible choice: humanity or the alien. The Doctor says that was wrong: she’s never to decide for him.

Amy says she doesn’t even remember doing it, and the Doctor says he doesn’t care: when they’re done here, she’s going home.

Amy ask why: just because she made one mistake that she doesn’t even remember?

But the Doctor’s in the grip of a moral dilemma. He says he has three choices: does he leave the star whale in unendurable agony, does he destroy humanity by destroying the ship, or does he lobotomise the star whale, so it carries the ship onwards and feels no pain?

He chooses lobotomy.

But as he’s preparing for this, Amy flashes back to the Doctor telling her to remember this—she remembers he’s the last of his kind and so is the star whale, she remembers the Doctor going to Mandy’s aid, the star whale arriving in the skies as the British children screamed, and the star whale’s refusal to eat the dissenting children.

And she grabs Liz 10’s hand and abdicates her.

The ship shakes a little, but increases speed.

AMY: Well, you’ve stopped torturing the pilot!

She talks to Hawthorne and Liz 10, explaining the reasoning above, but she’s looking at the Doctor. She says to him, speaking in the second person, that if you were that old and that kind, the last of your kind, you couldn’t just stand there and watch children cry.

ME: So where were you in “Children of Earth,” Doctor?

The Doctor watches out the window as Amy comes up and hands him Liz 10’s mask, saying the queen—former queen?—says there’ll be no more secrets on Starship U.K.

DOCTOR: You could have killed everyone on this ship.
AMY: You could have killed a star whale.

Of course, this ends with them hugging, as is the Doctor’s way.

Amy is reminded of her wedding day when the Doctor says it’s a big day tomorrow: “It’s a time machine. I skip the little ones.”

She asks if he’s ever run away from anything because he was scared.

DOCTOR: Once. A long time ago.
AMY: What happened?
DOCTOR: Hello!

Then the phone rings in the TARDIS, and it’s Winston Churchill. Let’s leave that for next week, shall we?

As the TARDIS dematerialises, we pan out of the Starship U.K. to a revised, more positive version of the doggerel from the elevator, only to see, on the side of the ship, the same crack that appeared on Amy’s wall when she was a child.

Ooh-er.

In which we discuss rain:

ME: It’s stotting down.
NICK: Ken Stott -ing.
ME: No.
NICK: I think it is.
ME: No.
NICK: It’s solid and dour.
ME: No.

Discussing my rain photographs from earlier today:

ME: I also took this picture.

ME: But I didn’t post it.
NICK: But that’s great!
ME: Really? I thought it sucked.
NICK: It looks like a Krynoid is trying to eat the house. It’s awesome.
ME: Krynoids eating the house is not awesome.
NICK: No. But when it looks like they’re going to eat the house and they don’t? That’s awesome.

My best friend has just sent me this conversation, which she had with her elder son (whom I call my nephew):

ELDER NEPHEW: Do you know why Auntie Treena loves the colour blue?
BEST FRIEND: No. Why?
ELDER NEPHEW: ‘Cause it’s the colour of the sonic screwdriver.

Makes me proud to think I was the one to buy him his first sonic screwdriver.

Oh, gosh: running really late here. Haven’t even managed dinner! But back soon.

But though I haven’t eaten dinner, I have drunk my share of a bottle of wine, so be prepared for some confused live-blogging.

Oh, it feels like such a long time since I’ve done any live-blogging. But I have a totem today: a model of a weevil, provided for this live-blogging. He’s sitting on the corner of my coffee table, watching me as I type. If I manage to get a decent copy, I’ll show you a Hipstamatic photo of him at the end of the live-blogging.

You’re welcome.

Close up on the Earth—that’s the only proper way to start an episode of Doctor Who. The TARDIS isn’t looking so good—and neither is the Doctor, since he’s hanging out the door of the TARDIS and frantically trying to avoid the spire on Big Ben.

Opening credits. I’ll say this now: I deeply, deeply hate the new music for Doctor Who.

After the credits, we pan over a lovely, moody garden, past a swing set, and up to a young Scottish girl who is praying to Santa.

GIRL: It’s Easter now, so I hope I didn’t wake you.

She says that there’s a crack in her wall—as I type her wish for Santa to send someone to fix it, or a policeman, I hear a tinny “Exterminate!” from the kitchen, where Michelle is opening a bottle of beer. I hope Santa isn’t sending a Dalek.

I tell Michelle and Heather that they were requested for the live-blogging.

MICHELLE: Was it Matt Smith? Because we love him. Thank you, Matt Smith! We love you.
HEATHER: Tell him I said “[Redacted] yeah!”

Yes, she actually said “Redacted.”

In that time, the girl is heading down the garden, where the Doctor has just crashed his TARDIS into the garden shed, and then climbed up with a grappling hook.

DOCTOR: I was in the library. Hell of a climb from down there.
GIRL: You’re all wet.
DOCTOR: I was in the swimming pool.
GIRL: You said you were in the library.
DOCTOR: So was the swimming pool.

The girl asks if he’s come about the crack in her wall, and he convulses as he regenerates.

DOCTOR: Does it scare you?
GIRL: No, it just looks a bit weird.
DOCTOR: No, the crack in your wall. Does it scare you?
GIRL: Yes.

The Doctor tells her to come with him, to trust him, and to not wander away. But in the first place, he wants an apple. Apparently, he’s craving apples.

But no: he doesn’t want apples. Or yoghurt. Or bacon. Or beans. Or bread and butter. He wants fish fingers and custard.

It’s fair to say that we’re all disgusted by this, and even more so when Nick tells us Matt Smith ate these in every take, because he hates it when actors don’t eat.

As he eats his fish custard, the girl tells him that she’s Amelia Pond, she has no parents (only an aunt, who is “out”), and that she had to leave Scotland.

The Doctor asks if she’s scared.

AMELIA: I’m not scared.
DOCTOR: Of course you’re not. Box falls out of the sky, man falls out of box, man eats fish custard, and you just sit there. So you know what I think?
GIRL: What?
DOCTOR: Must be a hell of a scary crack in your wall.

Upstairs, the Doctor tells Amelia that the crack in her wall is a crack in time and space, a tear in the fabric of the world. Through it, they can hear a voice saying, “Prisoner Zero has escaped.”

The Doctor tells her that to close the crack, he first has to open it all the way.

DOCTOR: You know when grown ups tell you that everything’s going to be fine, and you think they’re probably lying to make you feel better?
AMELIA: Yes.
DOCTOR: Everything’s going to be fine.

When the Doctor opens the crack, we see a giant eyeball. This, it seems, is Prisoner Zero’s guard, and the Doctor realises that this means that Prisoner Zero has escaped through Amelia’s house.

But before the Doctor can put his finger on what’s bothering him, the TARDIS starts to shut down, because of the damage it sustained. He tells Amelia it’s too dangerous to take her with him, but he’ll be back in five minutes. She packs her suitcase, pops on a duffel coat, and trots down the garden in her nightdress and wellingtons.

We see from the clock above the stove that when the TARDIS rematerialises, it’s more than three hours later.

The Doctor rushes into the house, shouting that he knows what’s wrong and that Prisoner Zero is here in this house. But before he can attract Amelia’s attention, he’s hit in the face with a cricket bat.

We cut to a hospital where the coma patients are all calling “Doctor!”, much to their doctor’s distress.

Back with the Doctor, he’s being faced with an extremely attractive red-headed policewoman in an extremely tiny mini-skirt, who tells him that she has back-up on the way and that Amelia Pond hasn’t lived here in six months.

The Doctor won’t believe this: he says he promised five minutes, so he can’t be six months late. The policewoman ignores him and turns around to request her sergeant to send back up soon.

Michelle can’t cope with how short the mini-skirt is. “She’s a stripper, isn’t she?” she asks.

Heather can’t cope with how mean the doctor is to Rory the nurse (who insists that he’s seen the coma patients wandering around the village).

The Doctor attracts the policewoman’s attention to the fact that there’s a whole door at the end of the hallway that she’s never seen before, even though she lives in the house.

She won’t listen when he tells her not to open the door, and won’t listen even when he tells her to get out after she finds his sonic screwdriver on a table in the room.

She won’t listen when he tells her not to look in the corner of her eye, so she sees the “interdimensional multi-form from outer space” that’s been hiding in her spare room.

The Doctor tells the policewoman to run, since she has back-up coming, but she says there is no back-up: she’s not a policewoman, she’s a kissogram. She pulls off her hat to reveal a cascade of red hair that I (as a Scotswoman by birth but not by breeding) would kill for.

We briefly debate what’s better: hair, eyes, or lips. We agree that all three is a pretty good outcome.

Prisoner Zero bursts out of the room in the form of a comatose man and his dog—the man is barking, not the dog. Luckily, the Doctor manages to get out of his handcuffs, as other aliens say that if Prisoner Zero doesn’t “vacate the human residence” then “the human residence will be incinerated.”

I’d like to blog the repartee about why the policewoman is not dressed as a French maid, but by the time I get to it, we’ve had the revelation that the policewoman is Amelia.

DOCTOR: You’re Amelia.
AMELIA: And you’re late.
DOCTOR: You’re Amelia.
AMELIA: And you’re twelve years late.
DOCTOR: You hit me with a cricket bat.
AMELIA: Twelve years, and four psychiatrists.
DOCTOR: Four?
AMELIA: I kept biting them.
DOCTOR: Why?
AMELIA: They said you weren’t real.

As they argue their way through the town, they hear the prison guard’s message echoing from all available loudspeakers.

HEATHER: They mean the Earth!
ME: Heather! Spoilers!
HEATHER: Well, if I can guess it, it’s not much of a spoiler.
ME: Maybe you’re just super-intelligent?
HEATHER: Tcha.

The Doctor bursts into a strange woman’s house, and demands to see her television, in between some banter about what Amelia does for a living, in which the Doctor gently chides her about being a kissogram.

AMELIA: You’re worse than my aunt!
DOCTOR: I’m the Doctor. I’m worse than everybody’s aunt . . . and that’s not how I’m introducing myself.

As the woman whose house they’ve broken into’s grandson (wow, there’s a complicated possessive) comes in, we find that Amy (as Amelia prefers to be known) used to draw cartoons of the “Raggedy Doctor” when she was a child.

The Doctor reveals that the “human residence” is, as Heather suspected, the Earth, and he and Amy wander across the village, with the Doctor rampaging about duck ponds and something he’s missed. But Amy’s hit her breaking point, and she drags him over to a car and shuts his tie in the door.

CAR OWNER: Amy, I am going to need my car back.
AMY: In a minute. Now go have coffee.
NICK: You get the impression she’s been terrorising the village for years.

The Doctor convinces Amy to trust him, despite the fact that he’s let her down before and, perhaps, is the reason why she has the brittle carapace. He convinces her to trust him by showing her the apple with a face on it that she gave him twelve years ago.

She does chose to trust him, and they run to the one person who is not photographing the eclipsed sun (a pre-runner to the Earth being boiled), but is photographing the man with a Rottweiler from earlier. This is Rory, Amy’s friend/boyfriend and nurse from the coma ward, where Prisoner Zero is taking advantage of the comatose human minds, allowing him eight disguises.

The Doctor tries to attract the attention of the guard-ships—have I mentioned them before? Big ships with giant eyeballs in them? Heather found them hysterical—with his sonic screwdriver, but it explodes and Prisoner Zero melts down a drain.

The Doctor, in the meantime, wants to see Amy’s friend Jeff (the grandson from earlier), because he has a giant laptop. He steals Rory’s phone, and sends Amy and Rory off to the hospital.

With Jeff’s computer, the Doctor hacks in on a super-secret conference call and proves his genius status by sending them a series of impossible formulae (including faster-than-light travel, “with two diagrams and a joke”). He tells the assembled bigwigs, including Patrick Moore, that he’s writing a computer virus, and he’s writing it on Rory’s phone, for reasons that he won’t explain just yet.

Amy works her way into the hospital thanks to her policewoman’s uniform, but they’re stopped by Olivia Coleman and two small girls, who they rapidly realise are actually the multi-form, because they’re speaking out of the wrong mouths again.

The multi-form breaks into the ward where Amy and Rory have buttressed themselves, but the Doctor drives his stolen fire engine up close enough to the window to climb through, and confronts the multi-form.

He tells it (him? her?) to open another crack in the universe, to escape that way. But she (it? he?) tells the Doctor that she didn’t open the crack in the first place. She taunts him for not knowing where the cracks come from: “The universe will crack, and the Pandorical will open.”

(We have a brief but spirited debate about whether it was “Pandorical” or “Pandoricum,” but Michelle backs me up and we go with “Pandorical.”)

Then the consequences of the computer banter in Jeff’s room is revealed, as the Doctor resets all clocks in the world to zero (Prisoner Zero, that is), and points out that the Atraxi (the prison guards) can track a virus to its source—Rory’s phone.

Prisoner Zero has one last option: the mental link it’s formed with Amy after living in Amy’s house for twelve years.

It appears as the Doctor.

DOCTOR: Well, that’s rubbish. Who’s that supposed to be?
RORY: That’s you.
DOCTOR: Is that what I look like?
RORY: Don’t you know?
DOCTOR: Busy day.

But the Doctor says that Amy is thinking of him (the Doctor) because she’s dreaming, and he tells Amy to dream of what she saw when she snuck into the hidden room. She does, and Prisoner Zero is forced into his own form.

(Oh, this is the hardest live-blogging I’ve done in years.)

Though the Atraxi grab Prisoner Zero and leave, the Doctor calls them back—apologising to Rory in advance for the bill.

Then he heads up to the roof, re-costuming himself as he goes. I stop live-blogging for a moment to watch that. I’ve watched every Doctor re-costume since Tom Baker (sob!) and I always love it.

On the roof, the Doctor challenges the Atraxi, asking them first if the world is a threat and secondly whether it is protected. The Atraxi, monitoring the world’s communications, flip through the faces of the previous ten regenerations of the Doctor. As they get to the Tenth Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor steps through the video projection.

DOCTOR: I’m the Doctor. Basically . . . run.

I have to stop live-blogging because I tear up a little and, as is obligatory at a regeneration moment, I have to press both hands really hard over my mouth.

But the Doctor legs it, because he feels the TARDIS key warming in his hand, leaving Amy behind—again—in his rush to try out the new TARDIS.

When he returns, Amy is dreaming that the Doctor did, after all, come back when she was a child—and she wakes to the sound of the TARDIS regenerating.

Of course, she rushes down to the garden, but only to tell him that all the events with Prisoner Zero happened two years ago.

Nevertheless, Amy steps into the TARDIS—and is the first of the new companions not to freak out because it’s bigger on the inside. But her eyes are as wide as eyes can get.

MICHELLE: Treena?
ME: Yep?
MICHELLE: I don’t like this episode.
ME: You don’t? Why?
MICHELLE: I just think the narrative is a bit weak.
ME: Okay. I’ll put that on the blog.
MICHELLE: Yep.

But Amy agrees to travel with the Doctor, on condition he gets her back tomorrow for “stuff”. (And why would she believe that? When he’s currently fourteen years late?)

Of course, as the TARDIS dematerialises and we pan across Amelia’s childhood toys of the Raggedy Doctor, we see that “stuff” is her wedding day. Either that, or she just collects wedding dresses.

And now, a fuzzy picture of a weevil:

Oh, it’s been a while since I live-blogged. Apologies for any incoherence. Join us again next week for another Steven Moffat episode!

In which I fret about whether to put a cardigan on over a strappy dress.

NICK: I think you’re looking better than you have for ages.
ME: Gee, thanks.
NICK: What?
ME: “I think you’re looking better than you have for ages”?
NICK: It’s a compliment! I think you’re substantially improved!

Remember when I was having fun with Hipstamatic the other day? (Oh, and again here?)

Well, this is more of the same, but now I’ve paired Hipstamatic with the equally awesome Swankolab, which allows you to develop your photos—both from Hipstamatic and just from your phone camera—in a variety of developing fluids.

(Even more fun? You can agitate the developing print in the fluid by shaking your camera. I will never become bored with that.)

Here’s the original image (of my gorgeous clock, which I love like a brother), taken with the Helga Viking lens on Ina ’69 film:

And here’s the exact same print, run through the various developing fluids that Swankolab offers as pre-made formulas:

Imagine how much fun I’ll have once I get around to mixing my own preparation of virtual chemicals!