The dust has settled on another great weekend of paintball at Smakzone. There were 163 players in attendance this year, including a very large mercenary team. Thanks to everyone there for such a great fight,  friendly and foe alike. OES VIII was yet another epic battle between the JSOC and the Contra.

First off, Blackout would like to thank Contra General, Tpot of Eville Empire,  for presenting us with Most Valuable Team. We are very proud to bear the honor. Next, thanks to JSOC general Tack and all of the blue players for such a great, hard fought game. Last, we would like to yet again thank field owner Mark Miles for the great field and atmosphere. All of your hard work never goes unnoticed.

Now,  Blackout reaches a break in the scedule for the summer. This fall can’t get here soon enough and we can’t wait to hit the field with everyone again. See everyone at FFO!

After a lot of hard work, we are very happy to announce the launch of our new site! As you can see, the wait is well worth it. A huge thanks goes out to Matt Miller and Tim Peluso for making this great site possible. We couldn’t have done it without them.

To all new visitors: make sure to register on the Blackout forums and check out our member pages.  Also, be sure to check back often, we have lots of great stuff on the way. Keep in mind that in order to keep our forums clean we have to activate your account, so you won’t be able to log in immediately. Thanks to everyone for visiting and please help us spread the word!

Another photo has been sent to us via email. We love these! Keep them coming!

With collective waning interest in D-Day 09, Blackout has decided to remove it from our schedule. We have been in search of a replacement game for sometime now, and think we may have found it. The event is called “Pusan Perimeter” and will be held at Bearclaw Paintball in Tennessee.  It will take place over the weekend of  October 10-11 which is later in the year and more convenient to attend. All information known at this time has come from the Special Ops factory team, as they will be attending the game. Though there is little information available, you can visit bearclawpaintball.com for further insight into field location and layout.

This image was sent to us by a user who wishes to remain anonymous. We’ve been getting several of these lately and if anyone else has pictures of Blackout in the wild, please feel free to send them to us and we’ll post them up.

I recently acquired a 2007 Octane Shocker NXT from PbNation for a great price. Around that same time Tim’s gat returned from receiving a fresh new ano from Gruntbull. We both couldn’t be happier.

For those of you that don’t know, Tim is a photographer (and I dabble in the art on occasion) so we decided we wanted to get some good shots of our new markers and post them on the blog. Well, here they are!

These were snapped in Tim’s studio with my Nikon D40 and Tim’s professional help. Comment and let us know what you think.

As many of you know, Spring Fling ‘09 was held this weekend at Smakzone Paintball. Blackout is still very much in it’s growing stages as a team, so this gave us an excellent opportunity to hit the field with some of our newer members.  Though the forecast showed a ninety percent chance of rain all day Saturday, we were all more than eager to get on the field and play some ball.

We had a great time, and as always, everyone had some great stories to tell around the fire. The team had a great chance to knock off some accumulating dust and get some practice for our busy upcoming ‘09 season. Thanks to all the people that headed out to Smakzone to share the field with us and can’t wait to see everyone at OES.

I’m writing this at work in between load times and when I have a few minutes to spare. Tomorrow is the Spring Fling at Smak Zone Paintball in Patterson, MO and the few of us that are going are very excited. We’ve had some extreme roster changes this year alone and this will be the first game where the Blackout elite get to show the new guys around. We’re all excited to see how well everyone works together on the field. I think all of us Blackout boys are going to be either staying in the trailer or the cabin next to the field, so if anyone from our area is going to be around be sure to swing by and say hi.

No website updates this weekend due to the game, but soon you’ll see progress. Hopefully those of you going to Smak Zone this weekend will catch a few of us. Anyway, have a good weekend; we know we will.

If you can see this, that means that the first installation of the new Blackout website is underway! Yes, I’m an idiot and I’ve decided to build this thing while it’s live. The main reason being that we’re not generating a lot of traffic right now, anyway, and I’d like to keep some of the paint slingers that do visit here up to speed.  Over the next few weeks, you’ll probably see things break a lot, so don’t sweat it.

Things I’m going to be working on over the next few weeks, in order of priority:

• Comments
• Archives
• Categories
• Events

I really want to tackle member profiles, but can’t really get to that until we have a majority of the pictures taken. Anyway, I’d like to ask that you all keep checking back as we’d all like some feedback on the new web presence of Blackout.