Starting Funland

So, 500 blocks in Minecraft is a lot bigger than I was thinking. I found a place where I think Funland will be, already working on the entrance. After beginning the project, just the entrance seems like such a big task, let alone all the other parts of the park. I'm really going to try to put a lot of thought into the things I do because this park will be what people who join my server see. I've decided to base some of my design choices around real amusement parks, using facades and "employee only" areas. Right now I don't have any sort of area border plugin installed, so it will only be for show, but I do intend on adding something. Do any of you have any thoughts on what I can use for this? The one public server I play on (Avidcrafter) uses Worldguard, so if any of you have experience with that and want to tell me if that will do what I want, please let me know. I've also got to decide if I want to keep weather turned on in this world. Right now, most of the park will be in the desert, so weather won't matter, but I'm pretty sure there will parts of the park that are in other biomes, which will mean rain and/or snow. I do have a good area in the desert minimum 250x250 I can use for the park, and there's still a good amount of desert that is unexplored, so there will be a lot of room to grow. Anyway, please leave any feedback you have for this project, because I'm sure there's a lot of ideas I'm missing.

Ideas so far

So far I've come up with the following things for the amusement park:
Roller Coaster
Zoo
Spleef Arena
Melee Arena
Bow Arena
Mob Arena
TNT Arena
Glass Maze
Hedge Maze
Monorail
Tunnel of Love
Shooting Gallery
Food Court
Carousel
I'm thinking I'll start with an area about 500x500 and I should hopefully have enough space for it all and more space to grow.

More Funland ideas

A monorail that goes around the whole park
A tunnel of love
Some kind of carousel that might use minecarts?

The roller coaster

So, some ideas I've had that I wanted to get out of my head so I'll remember them are:
a portion that goes under a lava fall and a water fall, and something that goes deep underwater, and at bedrock, and all the way up to height limit, and through abandoned mines, and all around the amusement park.

Epic Good Time Funland!

So, I have this idea planned for my Bukkit world, actually a couple. I'll go into them in a bit more detail here. They are both large, ambitious projects that will take a long time to complete, and hopefully some of the other players on the server will join in too.
The first is Epic Good Time Funland (name is a WIP). It will be our Minecraft amusement park. There are a few things I intend to build there, and I'm sure more will come to me as time goes on. So far I've got ideas for having a roller coaster (what's an amusement park without a roller coaster), a "petting zoo" (although I don't know if I'll be able to keep hostile mobs from despawning), a mob arena (big top maybe?), a gladiator arena (for some real melee pvp action), a bow arena (like the mindcrack paintball area), glass maze (or some kind of maze, maybe hedge), and much more.
Obviously, if you guys have any ideas of things you want to see in there, let me know and I'll do whatever I can to make it happen. The plan is to do it all as legitimately as I can, but still using the Bukkit tools at my disposal. I was originally going to start with a flat world using a world-generator but have since changed my mind to start with a new real world and just clear the land. Would give me a lot more to do, but also a lot more resources to work with.
The second project I had in mind wasn't exactly for me, but I'm considering either creating another server for my son's Hunger Games, or creating a hunger games world on the Bukkit server for him to play with. I have a lot of untapped potential on my server right now, I could probably run at least 2-3 more servers on it and was looking into Multicraft, but I don't feel like spending the money on something I can do with just a little more effort.
The hunger games that my son is doing is all arenas he is building in creative mode with no special addons or plugins, so having a separate server for him to play with might make it easier for him to make sure he does everything he wants with that.
I look forward to your feedback with ideas and suggestions!

Mindcrack Public Server

I got in! For those of you who weren't lucky enough to ever make it into the Mindcrack Public Server, I've got a video uploading right now. I hope to maybe get back in at a later time, once it all dies down a little. I'm not really sure what it will be like at that point though.
Some of you might have noticed in my video something I didn't notice until after I put it together, turns out I got connected just a minute or two before they rebooted, which is what really kicked me.
For those interested, the address is mindcrack.mcprohosting.com

Avidcrafter

So, I haven't heard back about whether the server is actually public, but I found a post on the Minecraft forums advertising it, so I'm going to assume it is ok to give out the information.
I will take down the link if the owner asks me to, but everything seems to say it's open to anyone who wants to join.
Click here to access server information.

A new style of post-production

So, with this next video, I'm trying something I've never done before, and the video is still rendering, so I really don't know how well it will turn out, but I would really like feedback about whether it was any good or if I should try something else.
I have seen other people do something similar, and it seemed to work pretty well in their videos, so I thought I've give it a try to spice up the less interesting portions of my hardcore series. I have to record the whole thing anyway because you never know when I could die, so I thought I needed to find a way to incorporate all the less than awesome footage into the episodes without boring my viewers.
Obviously this won't happen too often, but I figure I'll need to branch mine from time to time and I might decide to build something big (like a mob farm in the sky or something). If this works out well enough I will start using this style in future videos, and not just hardcore.

A few things

One, I'd like to apologize for the lateness of Mining with Munchmo, but I had a long weekend at work, so I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to get videos put together.
Today I should be recording another special video for you, although I'm not exactly sure how it will turn out. My son wants me to play in his Hunger Games series, and so I will, and I will record it, but I'm not sure how the footage will be, or even what being part of the games involves.
I will definitely get a new Meandering put up on time this week. And I will keep up with Hardcore, although with the new Avidcrafter server I won't be pushing out as many hardcore episodes as I was. I do think I'm going to try something a little different in the next hardcore episode though, and see how that goes.
On an unrelated note, EA released another video showcasing the GlassBox game engine that was built for the new SimCity. I absolutely cannot wait for the game, it looks so unbelievably awesome. If you're interested in checking out the video, click here.