Why I Named a Company After a Raccoon Suit

I work at Tanooki Studios. I also own Tanooki Studios, founded Tanooki Studios, and am the entire staff of Tanooki Studios, so "work at" is doing some heavy lifting there. But it's where I go every day, and people keep asking me two things about it: why does it exist, and what the hell is a Tanooki.

Second question first, because it's the fun one.

The suit

In Super Mario Bros. 3 there's a power-up called the Tanooki Suit. It's a full-body raccoon costume. You put it on, you can fly, and, if you crouch and hit the button, you turn into a small stone statue. While you're a statue, nothing can hurt you. Enemies walk right past. Then you pop back out and carry on.

I loved that suit as a kid with a specificity I couldn't have explained at the time. I can explain it now: it's the autistic power-up. You get to fly, which is the good part of a brain that runs differently, the part where you can go deep on a problem for twelve hours and forget to eat. And when the world gets loud, you get to turn into a statue and let it walk past you. Nobody can touch you. You're still there. You come back when you're ready.

The suit is also, and I want to stress this, a costume of a Japanese raccoon dog worn by an Italian plumber, which is one of the most unhinged sentences in video game history and I think about it more than is healthy.

When I needed a name for the thing I was building, I didn't want my own. I didn't want anything that sounded like a startup. I wanted something that felt like mine and made me smile when I typed it. Tanooki was right there.

The other thing the statue does

There's a second reason, and it took me a while to notice it.

When Mario's a statue, you don't see Mario. You see the statue. The work is visible and the person isn't, and that's exactly how I want this to run. There's no photo of me on the Tanooki site, or on this one, and there won't be. I'm happy to tell you I'm autistic and that I work alone, because both of those explain what the apps are like. Beyond that, the apps are the point. Stand behind the statue. Let the work walk out front.

Why it exists at all

Because I kept wanting a tool and not being able to find one that felt right.

Not "didn't exist." There's an app for everything. But over and over I'd go looking for something simple, and what I'd find was an account wall, a subscription, a privacy policy longer than the app, and analytics quietly phoning home about how I used the button. For a thing that could have run entirely on my own computer. For a thing my computer was perfectly capable of doing without asking anyone's permission.

So I'd build my own. And then I'd build another one. And at some point I looked at the folder and realized I wasn't making one-off tools anymore. I had a way of doing it, and the way was the same every time:

• If your computer can do the job, it does the job. No server of mine in the middle unless there's a real reason, and if there is, I tell you what connects and why.
• No account just to try it.
• No hidden analytics. No "help us improve your experience." I don't need to know what you do with it.
• Prices that don't treat you like a wallet with a refill schedule.
• One person who will actually read the email when something breaks. That person is me. The bug is mine. I already know where to look.

That's the studio rule, more or less. Once I had a rule, I had a studio. The name came after.

Where the work actually happens

Tanooki Studios is one autistic developer in Florida. There's no office. There's no team standup, because there's no team, though I do still occasionally say "okay, what are we doing today" out loud to a room with nobody else in it. [TK: a line or two about the actual desk / room / setup, if you want it here.]

The pace is a lot. Ten, twelve hours most days. I want to be careful about how I say that, because I'm not recommending it, and I'm not bragging about it. It's just what happens when the thing you'd do for fun is also the thing you do for work and there's nobody around to tell you to stop. The flying half of the suit. I'm still learning when to be the statue.

Testing happens the way it can when you're one person: I break my own stuff on purpose, and then friends and family break it by accident, and they're better at it than I am. There's a beta list on the Tanooki site if you'd like to join them. Fair warning, you will find bugs. That's the job.

What's on the bench

Nine apps right now. Two are out: Eat Safely In Florida, which is every restaurant inspection the state has ever published, in the inspectors' own words, and TimelineTrack, which tells you what order to watch a franchise in without spoiling anything you haven't asked about. The rest — a Mac transcription app that never sends your audio anywhere, a dictation tool, a Mac email client, a personal health record you actually own, a couple of others — are in various states of testing, in the order they make sense.

No launch calendar. I've met me.

So

Tanooki Studios is a raccoon suit. It's a way of flying, a way of hiding when I need to, and a rule about what software should and shouldn't do to the people who use it. The name still makes me smile every time I type it, which after this much typing, I'm taking as a sign I picked right.

If you've read this far and you're wondering whether you should start your own thing: I can't tell you that. I can tell you that the day I stopped waiting for someone to hand me a job I could stand and just made one, everything got harder and better at the same time. Which, now that I write it down, is also a pretty good description of the suit.