Deepthought: Accommodator (or, On the Life of a Friend)

This is a hobby editorial. I went to school to become and try to make my living as a writer. Though I love the hobby, and I'd like nothing better than to sculpt all day, posting amazing things on here for all to ogle, there are times when the urge to write strikes, and I try to use these interludes to delve deeper into important parts of the hobby. I hope you find the following article interesting, and I promise to get back to posting cool models soon!

When I started writing this, it was titled "On the Death of a Friend," but then I realized that, were I in your shoes, that is not the type of title that would inspire me to read an article. Thus, I changed it, and I like it better already.

This is an anniversary of sorts, i guess, though it's hardly a thing to memorialize. This is the 3-year anniversary of the death of a good friend of mine, who went by the name Ross Nickle under the sun and the stars, but who was known as Accommodator in the digital world of posts and threads. Ross was most active on the Tyranid forum Warpshadow, and for the years when he was as our administrator, that board ran like a well-oiled machine. You may have run into him on other boards as well: particularly those that had anything to do with Titans and Titan Legions.

Like the passing of Brimstone (for those of you who can still remember Brimstone), Ross' death was an odd thing. It happened once in Real Life, happening to families and friends and co-workers. But then it happened again Online, weeks later, when the news was released to the communities. And in those communities, that news spread further than it ever could in Real Life, for over these information superhighways we touch more lives than we know.

If you knew Ross online (as Accommodator), you may not have known him as well as I had the fortune to in Life. As an attempt at remedying any disparity, I am finally getting around to this: something I've been meaning to write for some time. In it I hope to capture the Ross that I knew, and I hope to further fill out the Ross that you might have known. I'm not sure why it came to me now, but here it is.

Tyran Table Interview with Miniwargaming.com

I got lost in the woods with the Norn Queen this week, which has meant that it has been a slower week when it comes to modeling projects, so I thought I'd post the following blast from the past. Back in 2009, when I tried to coordinate the first, full-scale Warpshadow table build while entertaining Germans, wrapping up my full-time job, and preparing to head to Japan for two years, we took on the task of recreating the battle at Tyran (it was for this project that Tom Box and I took a run at modernizing the Screamer Killer).

Tyran was the first official encounter between the Imperium and the eponymously named "Tyranids". It is the oldest of bits of Tyranid fluff, and it was the kind of thing a board full of Tyranid players wanted to do right when it came to creating a table to portray it. However, I was the project manager, and with all the aforementioned distractions going on, I feel like I never really managed to do the table build justice. I was stressed right up until the day, and though I'm sure folks had a good time and the table went alright, I was left focusing on what we missed out on, rather than what we accomplished.

Anyway. The Infestation of Casavant Prime it wasn't, but I guess I should revel in the fact that we did manage to coordinate Tyranid modelers from all over the globe to get it done. At Games Day Toronto 2009, the Canadian MiniWargaming.com dudes rolled on by to film the table and to interview me, and here's how it came out.


NOTE: In the caption below the video, it identifies the Nids in the video as belonging to my army. This is very much not the case (particularly since some of Moloch's Lictors and Hormagaunts were in there), and once the project was over, I wound up shipping the majority of the nids back to their respective creators. 

Warpshadow has gone dark

Howdy folks.

Anyone who knows me from Adam knows that I've been involved with Warpshadow.com, pretty much, since the inception. It is a place near and dear to my heart, and though I know nothing about WebMagicTomfoolery, I have an abundant amount of enthusiasm for the board. Unfortunately, boards don't run on enthusiasm alone, and as much as I love the board, that love can't obliterate the nefarious work of hackers.

Thus, as we had recently come under the crosshairs of hackers, and there were all kinds of weird redirects happening when people tried to access the board for about a week now, we contacted out service provider and asked for help. They took a look through our files, found some ones that had been messed with, and, promptly, obliterated those files.

Unfortunately, those files were rather essential for the operation of the Phpbb backend of the message board  :|

So, when they removed the infected files, Warpshadow went dark.

Now the Gestalt is faced with the mammoth task of resurrecting the board from our back-ups and patching the holes that let the hackers through in the first place. Understand that NONE of us are web-heads, so we are, pretty much, clueless when it comes to how to move forward. We will be relying a great deal on our service provider for help with this, and I ask that you all have patience with the other members of the Gestalt/Admin team. Unfortunately, I will be away and out of synapse range for the next week, so I am trusting this all to Yaleling, Hydra, Hive Node, and Moloch. If anyone has any help that they could provide to them, I encourage them to do so.

Rest assured that we will restore the Shadow in the Warp as soon as we are able!

The Tyranid Archive - A Piece of the Hive Mind

Here's something I had completely forgotten about, but just rediscovered and figured was perfectly timely for us going over 4th Generation/Edition of Tyranid models this week. A few years back, when Moloch was better connected with the studio, he managed to score an interview with Phil Kelly and Jes Goodwin on the heels of the 4th Edition codex release. I feel like the article explains itself, and it's always lived on Warpshadow, but I've reproduced it here for the sake of completeness and ease of use. I can't promise that it's aged well, but it does give a unique insight to the minds of the creators. If anything, it's a pretty solid indication of just how open the studio used to be that Jes and Phil were ever allowed to give an interview like this to someone who wasn't employed by Games Workshop.

The Art of Jutami

The concept series is my schizophrenic attempt to shine light on the art that inspires me. I always do some of my best work when working from concept sketches. I find the hard lines and white space conducive to creation as they give you just enough definition to get you going, while still leaving space to do your own thing. Here's hoping you find these sketches as helpful and inspiring as I do.

The next installment in the Concept Series comes from another fairly recent addition to the Warpshadow forums: Jutami. He gained people's attention with his big beastie conversions--particularly his very heavily armoured Swarmlord. He also caused a fair few eyes to bug out when he revealed his clean, masterfully-applied, nearly luminous paint scheme. And, most recently, he rose to the task when forum admin Hive Node asked for artist on the board to contribute their pen-and-pencil renderings of Tyranids for the inspiration of other bugs on the board.

The Screamer Killer rides again

To build up some content on the site, I'm going to be posting a few of my past projects that were kind of like milestones in my development as a sculptor. I'll call them "Old Strains," and you can feel free to check them out if you're curious.



The classic Jes Goodwin pewter Carnifex/Screamer Killer has always inspired me. When they look at it these days, most people see an oddly constipated-looking beast intent on giving someone a big hug with those curvy arms of his. However, when I look at the thing, I see the model that first got me into Tyranids specifically, and Warhammer 40K in general, back in the mists of second edition. It also reminds me of the black-and-white sketch that greeted me when I first opened the Tyranid codex all those years ago:

From Plastic Screamer Killer

Though I love the pewter Screamer-Killer, and I still field them to this day (well, on the few occasions when I actually play), I’ve always felt that there was so much more potential in that sketch than the rudimentary casting processes GW used to use could ever truly capture.

The Infestation of Casavant Prime

To build up some content on the site, I'm going to be posting a few of my past projects that were kind of like milestones in my development as a sculptor. I'll call them "Old Strains," and you can feel free to check them out if you're curious.



With my budding work on Tyranid Scenery from scratch coming along, I was asked by some friends in Toronto to breathe some Tyranid life into their table build for Games Day Toronto 2008. These guys had been bringing original tables to Games Day for a couple of years, and the previous year their extensive trenchwork table had been beaten out by a PC speaker and a smoke machine. This year they were determined to bring the pain to their long-time table nemeses.

The meat and bones of the table were actually constructed by the original build team and took the form of a cityscape with a canal running down the center, and me, Accommodator, and our creative ilk were given free reign to add some flare to the cityscape by transforming it into one that was in the beginning stages of a full-blown Tyranid infestation. I jumped at the opportunity to have a focus for my until-now-largely-aimless Tyranid scenery building.