Christopher Setterlund, In My Footsteps

Monday, May 11, 2026

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #120: Scam Alert, Too Many Bays, Chinless Fool, etc.

1. Sometimes my brain doesn’t get the message fast enough. I was responding to a local library about doing a speaking event later this summer. I then got a new email from another local museum. My first thought was that it was for another speaking event, which would be awesome. I opened it, and it had a link to an ecard. Thinking it was maybe an invite to some event at the museum, I clicked on it. As soon as it was done downloading, it asked to upload the software. I knew then it was a scam. I deleted the ecard and quickly changed my Google password and turned up my security in my banking app. I got so caught up in the potential of making money selling books that I didn’t spot an obvious scam until it was almost too late. I read that this is something new, where hackers send this type of invite from an email in your contacts, so it doesn’t look suspicious. Just beware.

2. They came late this year, but the allergies have arrived. I had a young client this week who was dragging when he came in. I asked him how he felt, and he said he had a slight sore throat and a stuffy head. I was naturally worried, but he said he thought it was allergies. I told his mother to keep us posted as to how he felt the next morning. She called and had to cancel his appointment because he didn’t feel well. I felt lethargic and a bit foggy the next day. Worried that it might be sickness and not allergies, I went online and checked the for New England. Luckily, or not so for me, the pollen count is extremely high this week. I was never so happy to have a couple of clients cancel. It gave me time to stay glued to my chair. Hopefully, the rain coming later this week will knock down the pollen.

3. Sometimes I don’t understand the way things are labeled on Google Maps. I was looking up a place in Plymouth, MA. When starting to zoom in, I noticed a little section of water in Plymouth Harbor was labeled as . What? Then, further out to see the same water was labeled as Plymouth Bay. Ok? Oh, and in the same vicinity, there were also Kingston Bay and Duxbury Bay. Like, wait a minute, does every town there have a bay? Why isn’t all of it Plymouth Bay? How did Cape Cod Bay slip a little extra chunk of water in there? What is this foolishness? Maybe it’s because it was late and I was getting tired that this bothered me so much. I got a screen grab, so you all can feel the same chaos and panic as I did when I saw this.

Too many bays

4. I have had a pretty good-sized white goatee on and off for a few years. I tend to get rid of it in the summer, but the rest of the year, it looks like a bag of alfalfa sprouts on my chin. That came back to bite me this week. I was the guinea pig for a posture screen app for a new employee. You know, being a good coworker and helping out. She had to take 4 photos of my posture: front, back, and both sides. We did this in our gym. The walls of the gym are white. I didn’t think it would matter. When taking the photos, the AI automatically removes the background so that you can focus on the person. What happened was that in one of the side-facing photos, the AI mistook my white beard for the wall and proceeded to remove it. The end result was me looking like I had no chin. It literally went from mouth to neck. I couldn’t stop laughing. I joked I’d make it my social media profile pic. Or even better, use it on a dating site. Don’t worry, I got a photo of it so you can see this abomination.

5. Word travels fast. I had a really fun author event at the last week. It was for my latest book, which is all about . It was a rousing success. The event has paid even more dividends as people who were there have spread the word. In just a week or so since that event, I have added 3 more events to my calendar this upcoming summer. It is exciting because I love doing those events. Being involved in some sort of creative field has been the goal for decades. I try everything: podcasts, books, blogs, social media videos, . Getting to do some sort of work in those fields makes me feel alive and fulfilled. I have also learned that when it comes to these events, I need to just say yes and figure things out later. I never want to give an establishment a reason to rescind their offer. Luckily, I have a day job that allows me to be very flexible with my schedule. It really is the best of both worlds. Who knows, these upcoming events may not be the only ones to come from that one at West Dennis Library. Also, the new ones I’ve scheduled could lead to many more. I want it to get to the point that I am so busy that I start needing to cut time from my day job.

6. I mention a lot that I am working hard, trying to pursue a career in something creative. Whether writing, podcasting, or film, anything that allows me to use my creative mind to make a living sets my soul alight. That being said, I also make sure to routinely take a step back and appreciate where I am in life. I am very fortunate to be where I am at this point in my life. I have easy access to many close family members. I still have several close friends nearby. I am, for all intents and purposes, in good health as I sadly hurdle toward 50. This allows me the ability to go out and take a long walk on a sunny spring morning on a beautifully scenic route right from my front door. As much as I am working hard and fighting for my future, I am also very appreciative of the life I have now. Things can and do change, so I have to stop and be present as much as possible while I can.

7. Where were you during the great ? This week, millions of bot accounts were deleted from the platform. It sent shockwaves through the social media community. Some big celebrities and influencers lost millions of fake followers. Me? I lost around 50. No, I’m not a big celebrity, but I was at least glad that the vast majority of my followers are real people. Now, granted, some of them might be inactive accounts that haven’t been used in a decade. I have no way to know. Honestly, the other major social media apps should follow suit and clear out the bots. I guarantee it would make the whole experience better without fake accounts that are only created to cause chaos and spread misinformation. I might never have deleted my Twitter (never calling it stupid X) account if it wasn’t overrun with bots, oh, and jackasses.

8. For 2026, I have come up with a couple of fun series of articles to write. One is looking back at 1996, the year in general. This is because it’s 30 years ago, and the year I graduated from high school. I look at music, friendships, relationships, and more. The other one branches off from the first. I call it ‘.’ What does it mean? Basically, I look at seminal moments from my life where a change to what happened would have caused major ripples in my life. I explain reality and also try to guess where I would be in an alternate world. The first article in that series has to do with my choice to not go away to college right after high school. It ended up being a very deep topic that took 2,700 words to finish. I am excited about this series in particular. It’s sort of like getting to live out a fantasy life without leaving my desk. In reality, I believe that I am where I am in life for a reason. Although I might take a brief pit stop in the land of regret, I can’t stay there. A wise man () once said: “Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.”

Coming soon...

9. Because I never feel like I have enough on my plate, I decided to start noodling with a pair of new ideas. One book, one television show. The book would be a children’s book about characters that are half animal and half food. They would get fused together with the food they are eating due to a freak lightning strike. Hey, it’s a children’s book; it doesn’t have to be based in reality. The idea came from my niece Sylvie, who said she found a frog and named it Pickles because its back looked like a pickle, green and bumpy. From there, my wacky imagination took over. The other idea is a comedy show based on my experiences in restaurants. I’d base it in the 1990s and use a lot of scenarios that really happened. I could always embellish some and naturally change names, but I think that would be funny. If I had more free time I’d really push these two ideas but for now I’ve got outlines and some sketches. Which would you want to see first?

10. Happy Mother’s Day this week to my mom, Laurie. She has always been my biggest fan, biggest supporter. I admit that a big part of my drive to succeed in creative fields is so that I can validate all of the support and sacrifice that she made for my siblings and me. She went to school full-time while working full-time, while also being the mother of five kids. I have always tried to show my appreciation for that. I believe that I didn’t as much as a kid, but now, as I get into my late 40s, I realize just what my mom did. Happy Mother’s Day to my mom, and thank you. To my sisters, aunts, cousins, and friends who are mothers, I hope the day was as good as it could be for you.

Sunday, May 10, 2026

In My Footsteps Podcast. Hidden Track #2: Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab

Welcome to the second Hidden Track Podcast!

These are short-form shows, clocking in at roughly 10-15 minutes. They will cover a topic or two, likely previously covered on the In My Footsteps Podcast. These are subjects that were part of Top 5's or other list-form segments and deserve a more in-depth look.

The second podcast takes a look at possibly the most dangerous toy ever created. The Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab was a real thing. Released in the early 1950s, it contained real radioactive material and was marketed toward children. How was this ever greenlighted?

Enjoy this bite-sized podcast. They will be available on the first Sunday of each month going forward. For access to the shows as soon as they debut, you can become a member on Patreon.

Or you can support my work and Buy Me A Coffee!

Helpful Links from this Episode

Listen to Episode 243 here

Friday, May 8, 2026

1996 Changed Everything: Pt. 3 - The Message of the Music

This is going to be a series of articles about 1996, as it holds significance for me since it was the year I graduated high school. In this second article, I look at the music of the day and how it impacted my life then and still does today.

1996 in many ways, was a tale of two halves. The first half was all about me trying to finish strong as my senior year of high school drew to a close. The second half was a recalibration. The seemingly endless grind of school had ended. Sure, there was college on the horizon, but for all intents and purposes, that was voluntary.

What I didn’t know then but know all too well now is that when you go hard for a long time, you get calloused. Your body and brain get used to the grind. Once you take your foot off the gas, it’s hard to get the motor running again, or the motivation to do so.

Looking back, it makes the second half of 1996, mostly the fall into winter, a bit of a blind spot in my life. Senior year and all of the events surrounding graduation are seared into my brain thirty years later. That final summer on Cape Cod with my closest friends before they left for college is one of my most cherished memories of my life. Until the actual days they left to start new chapters in their lives, the reality of the situation didn’t set in.

In my world, 1996 still revolved around Grunge music, although now it was a post-Grunge Alternative music world. Long gone was Nirvana as Kurt Cobain had symbolically ended Grunge with his death in April 1994. That didn’t mean that Nirvana’s music wasn’t still a huge part of me and my identity.

The teenage angst that Kurt wrote about in his lyrics only grew stronger in me as the prospect of entering a new phase of life grew closer. My interest in lyric writing, more along the lines of poetry, began early in 1996. However, it was not a Nirvana song that inspired me to jot down my innermost thoughts and feelings. No, it was a real-life event that happened at my school.

As you read in my last article, my English teacher, one of the favorites I ever had, was fired from his job for allegedly soliciting a student to appear in an adult film he was producing. When inspiration strikes, sometimes it comes from the weirdest places.

To process the events surrounding our teacher, affectionately nicknamed Bubba, I bought a steno pad and got to writing. I can clearly remember sitting in my bedroom adorned with posters of musicians and sports heroes alongside my closest friend, Barry, and working on lyrics to a song about what was still a fluid situation at the time.

Music had always made me feel. I can remember listening to Queen’s song These Are the Days of Our Lives in 1991 and getting overwhelmed by its message of looking back on life as you age. I was 14 then and had music making me think and feel beyond my years.

Writing lyrics, or poetry, to certain music made me feel more like an artist. In the first half of 1996, the inspiration came from my Grunge and Alternative roots. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, and others filled my brain.

It was an interesting contrast to try to write about teenage problems that were happening in the present while trying to sound like a weathered adult looking back. My initial year of writing poetry was a lot of simple, sometimes cringe-worthy, attempts at rhyming and explanations of life. College and the music I was exposed to would drastically improve my writing. Well, that and a surplus of new problems.

The music I tried to write to also served another purpose. It was a conduit for creative expression. A dream I had been trying to cultivate in the 1990s was that of being a filmmaker. I wanted to create worlds and share them. I spent around $800 of my savings in 1994 to purchase a bulky camcorder from Sears. That’s equal to just over $1,700 when adjusted for inflation to 2026.

That camcorder got used pretty much daily. By the time it kicked the bucket sometime in late 1997, I had recorded somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 hours of VHS tapes. There were skits, there were family holidays, and random, pointless moments that I captured that I cherish to this day.

The same model camcorder I owned in the 1990s

A major part of those VHS tapes is the music video. Simple, really, my friends and I set up my camcorder, played a song on a stereo, and performed it on camera. In today’s world, we’d call this low-hanging fruit for content. The videos all had a similar vibe. Teenage boys in the mid-1990s jamming out to songs they loved.

We did have our favorites. Nirvana ended up having nearly their entire catalog turned into music videos on my camcorder. It was a who’s who of Grunge, Alternative, and straight-up Rock music. Every now and then, we might switch it up and do something foolish to make ourselves laugh like Milli Vanilli, Color Me Badd, or the Brady Bunch theme. Of course, most of the videos are embarrassing to watch today, but we were kids, what do you want?

It’s a fascinating time capsule to look back at the week I graduated high school in early June 1996 and see what the music charts had to offer. Tha Crossroads by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony was #1. It was eerie as the song talks about losing a friend. Now, we were losing friends as we went our separate ways for college, not death, but still, it was fitting.

The rest of the Top 10 that week was populated by stalwarts like Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Toni Braxton, SWV, Metallica, and George Michael.

In general, music was trending away from the Grunge-Alt movement and into more polished pop, dance, boy bands, and that song they beat into the ground, ‘Macarena.’ That song debuted right around the time I graduated and dominated the airwaves for the next year or more. I even had to do that foolish dance when at my orientation on my first day of college.

After school ended, my main connection to music came on two fronts: my job and my girlfriend.

I worked as a prep cook at a local restaurant during high school. I was lucky to have a coworker who was a friend and more like a brother at times. We were the same age within a few days, and we had similar tastes in music. What I liked a lot about Liam was that we were just different enough that he might turn me on to a different band, and if he didn’t like something, he had good explanations and not just ‘it sucks.’

I made mixtapes (yes, tapes) called Prep Boys Rock that we would play while working. It was a lot of what I’ve already mentioned, except with maybe a little more REM. We played music loudly, sometimes to the detriment of our job, but again, we were teenagers, what would you expect? Here is a Spotify playlist of some of those classics from the mixtapes.

There was a time our music was so loud that we couldn’t hear someone calling to us to bring something to the kitchen. That didn’t go over well with the guy who was a crusty old 60-something who didn’t have time for us crazy GenX kids. He stormed into our prep room, literally tore the radio out of the wall, and took it. We acted worried, but as soon as he left, we made fun of him for the rest of the day, and honestly, still to this day.

It wasn’t all mixtapes. Sometimes we’d get tired of the same old, and we’d listen to the radio. Now we’ll get very specific to where I grew up on Cape Cod. We had some classic stations on the air in the mid-90s, like Rock 104.7 and Pixy 103 (both rock), 96.3 the Rose, and 106 WCOD (both Top 40). But Liam and I tended to choose the stations that felt like they were speaking to us, like Underground 93.5. It was the alternative we enjoyed with up-and-coming bands we might not have heard of yet.

The other connection to music in the back half of 1996 was my girlfriend at the time. I was trying to share my world with her, and the best way I could do that was by sharing the music that made me feel alive. I turned her on to some of the alternative that shaped me. I made her introduction to alternative music mixtapes. For a teenager who didn’t know how to express vulnerable emotions well, sharing music became a love language.

She was one of the select few in my life that I sang for. I always loved to sing, and think I inherited a pretty good voice from my Grampa, who was a jazz singer. So I would put on these concerts where I’d sing a song or two like I was some sort of celebrity. Again, it was a love language to share something so few saw, or in this case, heard.

I turned her on to Stone Temple Pilots, especially. She loved Scott Weiland. In fact, we ended up going to see them in concert later on November 30, 1996. This was only a handful of shows before Weiland got busted for drugs and was eventually thrown in jail, with the tour being canceled.

Concerts were the big new shiny thing for me in 1996. Getting to travel and see bands I loved perform live was something that blew my mind. The first concert I ever attended was AC/DC on March 19, 1996, at Boston’s FleetCenter. It changed my life.

I went with my friends Dan, Pete, and James (aka Butch). It was so liberating to be on our own despite still being in high school. There might have been a little smoke in the car, but for the most part, we were responsible.

My introduction to live music began with Beavis and Butthead on the big screen, segueing into Back In Black, shattering my eardrums. AC/DC was one of the loudest live bands, and I had the proof. For the next three days, it felt like I was wearing heavy earmuffs due to how that music had slapped my ears silly. To this day, I am surprised at how good my hearing still is. I hope I didn’t jinx myself.

I mentioned at the top of this blog that the second half of 1996 has become a bit of a blind spot in my life. I had been going nonstop with school, and as Senior Year wound down, I made a choice to not go away to college. I chose to stay behind and, after taking a semester off, begin my college journey at the local Cape Cod Community College. Why? Possibly burnout, stress, confusion, and the biggest reason, my girlfriend. I will get deeper into that part in the next blog, though.

It’s interesting for me to go back to that time. I know I lived those days, and yet nothing stands out. I believe part of the reason was that as soon as I stopped grinding at school, my mind collapsed in a heap. Not having to be in a constant state of readiness swung me in the opposite direction, and I became soft and lazy. Yes, I was working, but what else?

By the time September rolled around, the vast majority of my friends were gone to their next chapters of life, some never to return. I felt like I hit pause, and once I started up again, I had to try to run to catch up.

I graduated from high school and, within a year, was slam dunked into confusion and desperation about my place in the world. I wasn’t even 20 and was in the quarter-life crisis mode. To this day, I find one of my biggest regrets in life was not going away to college immediately. That stepping off the gas pedal made it easier for me to coast. I don’t think I quite realized that I had shot myself in the foot with my choice to pause my education to bask in the glow of couple’s life.

I look back at the songs that captured my state of mind as 1996 drew to a close. The confusing new releases from Pearl Jam (No Code), Weezer (Pinkerton), and REM (New Adventures In Hi-Fi) seemed to perfectly reflect my own state of mind. The party was ending, but I had only noticed the crowds leaving once my voice was the one left echoing across an empty room.

Music would ease my mind, and it would also influence my writing as I tried to put into words changes I didn’t fully understand. Life was changing faster than I was ready for. January 1996 saw me as a high school student getting ready for the real world. In December 1996, I was in the real world, standing at the starting line and watching it disappear onto the horizon, all while familiar bands played the soundtrack.

The seemingly infinite horizon can be liberating and terrifying all at once.

Wednesday, May 6, 2026

In My Footsteps Podcast Episode 243: What Was A Yuppie?, 1990s Educational Kids Shows, TV Themes That Were Chart Hits, First Spam Email(5-6-2026)

Watch my acting debut film for free, Cape Cod Cthulhu!

What in the world was a Yuppie? What are some of the beloved 1990s educational children's TV shows? What television show themes were also chart hits?

Episode 243 brings the May flowers and the GenX nostalgia.

It begins with an answer to the question of what a Yuppie was. Synonymous with the 1980s, Yuppies were of a certain mold and lifestyle. They dominated the landscape of America for a few years and slowly faded away. We dive deep into their reign in the 1980s.

Barney, Bill Nye, Blue's Clues. These and more made up the must-see list of educational children's shows of the 1990s. It was a decade dotted with familiar favorites, soon to be legends, and oddities that screamed 90s.

The new Top 5 looks at some of the television show theme songs that made waves on the music charts. Hit shows, forgotten favorites, middling, and downright terrible shows. Somehow, these themes became hits.

This Week In History and Time Capsule looks back to the first-ever spam email, the bane of many people's existence.

You can support my work by becoming a member on Patreon.

Or you can Buy Me A Coffee!

Helpful Links from this Episode

Listen to Episode 242 here

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