Two of our good, and very creative, friends have decided to put their creativity to good use and are starting a steampunk-themed craft business. They're focusing on producing high-quality metal and leather accessories and art pieces, recovering most of their materials from thrift stores and garage sales in an effort to reuse and recycle for the sake of mother Earth. We here at DashedBorders consider ourselves to be honorary members of the Midnight Workshoppe team!

Natalie got the idea for CausePlay while she was studying abroad in Japan. She and her best friend have a strong interest in sewing and cosplay (constructing and wearing character costumes for fun!), but Natalie was battling with the idea that cosplay is a purely self-indulgant hobby. She wondered if somehow the hobby of cosplay could be used for the greater good of society. Having heard of people sometimes organizing charity picnics and walks incorperating cosplay, she decided to try and make an online meeting-place for people to organize and promote cosplay-related charity events and campaigns. The site is still in development, but we have very high hopes for it in the future.

This is a silly one. One day, we were trying to make a decision involving choosing a location, and we joked that we ought to just throw a dart at a map of the United States. Then we decided that could be a useful and fun Flash application. Then we decided it would be fun for users to be able to upload their own photos to the dartboard and take out their aggressions. We thew together the application and website in about a day or two! So far you can only throw darts at a map or a target, and the whole thing is pretty ugly looking, but until we can get our poor hands on a copy of Flash, it'll have to stay in development.

This was our first web endeavor together. Nick was learning guitar and Natalie wanted him to learn to play one of her favorite J-pop songs. After a fruitless and frustrating Google search for the guitar tab, Natalie wondered "Why hasn't someone made a website compiling all of the anime, video game, and J-pop sheet music and guitar tabs into one place?" With her design skills and Nick's database wizardry, we created Japanotes - a searchable database of links to sheet music, guitar tabs, and scores for Japanese music. So far, we've entered over 3,000 links by hand into the database. We've put development of this website on hold while we pursue other projects, but in the future we hope to implement a user accounts system allowing users to add new links and comment and rate existing songs.