I’m thinking I might try and play some more paintball this summer.
I have a pretty old Spyder Flash, and since I don’t really play that much any more a while back I decided to build a custom trigger board for it as a project for Hungry Hacker Industries. The project is going moderately well, I’m just waiting on buying some parts from Mouser to rebuild the solenoid circuit and then it’s just a matter of fine-tuning the firmware (which is probably going to be the most fun).
We used to be so crazy into paintball, it was amazing. Every weekend we’d play, usually outlaw-ball in a place called “the pit”, which was a giant hole in the ground where homeless people used to live until one of them set fire to it and the authorities ran them all out. It was probably 150′ deep and about 50 acres or so, and when you were down in there no one up on the roads would hear the slap slap slap of paintball guns because it was right next to a busy highway.
A couple Christmases back, everyone got gift cards for Walmart and basically all of it went on paintballs. My body was in a perpetual state of recovering from a mess of welts and sprains from tripping on a tree root or something. I was, however, pretty fit – nothing motivates you to run like a half-inch plastic ball traveling at almost 300 feet per second, coming at you with about 20 of his friends. So much fun.
Heck, even my wife used to play. I’m one of a few people not currently incarcerated who can honestly say he’s shot his wife in the face.