Christopher Setterlund, In My Footsteps

Wednesday, March 4, 2026

In My Footsteps Podcast Episode 234: 1980s Technology Fails, Get A Life TV Show, An 80s Computers Educational Short Film, Dark Side of the Moon(3-4-2026)

Order a copy of my acting debut film, Cape Cod Cthulhu!

A short-lived TV show that was ahead of its time. A vintage educational short-film about the rise of computers. Some of the biggest tech fails of the 80s.

Episode 234 helps March come in like a lion with a fresh batch of GenX nostalgia.

It starts with a look back at a short-lived television show that might have been way ahead of its time. Get A Life starred Chris Elliot and at times felt like a comedy fever dream. Though it only lasted two seasons this surreal, dark, and downright wacky show influenced many shows that came after it.

In the 1980s, computers were becoming a fixture in schools, homes, and businesses. Growing up in that decade, it was important for students to learn the ins and outs, the whats and whys, of computers. We review a classic vintage educational short film, Computers: Tools for People, from 1983.

Computers were a success, however many pieces of technology came out in the 1980s that flopped hard. This week's Top 5 will look at some of the biggest tech fails of the 80s. Hopefully, you didn't own any of these.

There is a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule looking back at the release of Pink Floyd's iconic album Dark Side of the Moon.

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Listen to Episode 233 here

Monday, March 2, 2026

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #110: Blizzard of 2026, Power Outages, Odd Captions, etc.

1. The Blizzard of 2026 came roaring in late Sunday night. By sunrise on Monday morning, we had power flash off several times, but luckily, it always came right back on. The funny thing was that I sleep with a white noise machine on, as I am a very light sleeper. Each time the power went off, the machine stopped, and I immediately woke up. The machine has several different sounds to sleep to. The default is running water. So when the power came back on, I was greeted with running water sounds. I would switch it back to the white noise only for the power to go back out a few minutes later. After doing this two or three times, I gave up and left the running water noise on. The white noise machine became my canary in the coal mine during the day. Since I didn’t need any lights on, I knew if that machine stopped, we had lost power.

2. Fittingly, during the day of the blizzard, I got nostalgic and watched a video I had shot with my camcorder of a blizzard we had on Cape Cod in 1996. That one was in the first week of January during my senior year of high school. We had 21” of snow from that. It was wild to see my siblings and me out shoveling during the peak of the storm near 11pm. We also scaled our roof with a ladder. Mind you, I was the oldest at 18, the rest were younger. It was a different time 30 years ago. While watching my brother and me driving around town during the storm in my mother’s blue station wagon, I noticed a few things. First, I was way more reckless with driving, doing fish tails, donuts, and getting stuck in snow banks. Second and perhaps more shocking was how much of an accent I had back then. Not sure if it was a conscious effort to speak without the Cape Cod accent once I started doing author events, or if it’s just something you can lose over time. It’s amazing how fast 30 years can go and not really feel like all that long.

3. One of the silver linings about the blizzard was that I could use shoveling the snow as a workout. I set my Fitbit up and got to shoveling during the height of the storm, around 12:30pm on Monday. It was hard-packed, cement snow, probably over a foot by that time. Despite it being heavy, it was not terrible to shovel since each scoop stayed on the shovel. I shoveled for about 70 minutes and clocked in roughly 715 calories burned. I felt really good about that and was looking forward to a hot shower and a bit of rest while the storm raged on. That was not to be though, as once finished shoveling, I found out that the power had gone out while I was outside. No shower, no hot food, just sitting in silence, slowly draining my phone’s battery. I guess I was foolish to think that power would stay on during one of the biggest storms in recent memory.

4. In total, it was close to 75% of Cape Cod that lost power during the blizzard. I believe at one point, the entire Outer Cape (Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown) was without power. I always say that at my age, I am old enough to remember growing up without the technology of the internet and smartphones. It was not some sort of a challenge, but we ended up there anyway. Unsure of how long power would be out, I tried to prolong the life of my devices as long as possible. I had a portable battery called PoweRocks that my mother had given me years ago. Smartly, I charged it before the storm. I used that to prop up my phone’s battery. Once it died, I plugged it into my laptop and drained that battery to slowly recharge the PoweRocks and my phone. When all else failed, I’d go sit in my running car with my phone plugged in. Surprisingly, that didn’t give me as much of a charge as I’d hoped. It was a game of musical chairs with my car, phone, laptop, and portable charger as I tried to keep some sort of connection to the outside world while the blizzard raged and then crews worked to restore power.

5. While out getting the lay of the land the morning after the blizzard, I had a fun adventure with my youngest niece, Sylvie, who lives nearby. I was out filming a video where I stood in a fresh snow drift to show people how deep the snow was when she spotted me. She was able to convince me to go for a walk with her mother and their dog through their neighborhood. It doesn’t take much convincing, though. My mother typically says Sylvie is my boss and can get me to do pretty much anything. The neighborhood we walked in wasn’t plowed at all, which made walking a chore. It was a fun time though, as Sylvie enjoyed diving into the snow and asking me to come and rescue her from it. Eventually, I offered to give her a piggyback ride back to her house. By this point, I had helped do a 2nd shoveling of the driveway on an empty stomach, plus done the walk, so I was tired. If I could have gone back to bed at 8:30am, I would have. Sylvie wanted me to hang out at her house, but I wanted to go home and collapse into a chair. She’s very convincing, but I had to say no. It’s hard because she’s smart and remembers everything. If I said I’d be back later, she’d hold me to it. I had to actually go home and relax, otherwise she’d call me out on it.

6. In total, we got somewhere in the neighborhood of 18-20” of snow on the Mid-Cape. The jackpot was a stretch from Plymouth, MA, down into southwestern Rhode Island. There, they got something like 3 feet of snow. The Blizzard of 2026 was breaking records set by the legendary Blizzard of ‘78. We had wind gusts of 80mph on Nantucket. I think Cape Cod got spared in terms of major beach erosion since the storm’s peak was during low tides. That being said, the videos of the Scituate shore were awful as they typically are during big storms. I have seen countless such videos of huge waves crashing into the sea walls and spraying into the air as high as the roofs of 3-story houses. I love Scituate, but it has to be a blessing and a curse for those who live there. You get beautiful scenery and shorelines, but also the threat of major beach erosion and storm surge damage. As of writing this entry, I believe that more than half of Cape Cod is still without power. It came back on where I live in the middle of the night after about 40 hours of darkness and cold. As I mentioned above, my white noise machine was my canary in the coal mine. I heard it turn on and checked the time. I hope that everyone else gets their power back soon. It’s no fun sleeping in a 55-degree room.

7. Once fully shoveled out, and once I felt the roads were passable enough, I took a little ride. I needed to try to charge my phone, so I figured rather than sitting in the driveway in my car, I’d go see how the area looked. It was an adventure for sure. The roads ranged from passable to totally unplowed. I drive a sedan, so my adventurous side is determined by whether my car can make it. I was more than willing to walk through deep snow to get cool photos and videos. The problem was finding a place where I could park. There was also the issue of downed trees and power lines. There were a few detours caused by trees across the road. I didn’t dare try to get any footage while driving, otherwise I’d end up in one of those ‘idiot driver’ fail videos. In the end, I went and grabbed some food at a supermarket that was open and called it a day. With no power for several days at my work, it left a lot of room for further adventures later in the week.

8. The difference in when certain areas of Cape Cod got their power back meant that, despite getting power back at 4am Wednesday morning, a lot of other places did not have it back. One such place was my work. I ended up with an entire week off from work. It wasn’t planned, and I couldn’t really enjoy it since half of it was under storm conditions. With half of the Cape not having power, all I could really do was sit around and relax, which is not my favorite activity. It’s amazing the luck of the draw where a select few never lost power during the blizzard, others (like me) got it back in a day and a half, while more had to wait 4 or 5 days. There was really no rhyme or reason, but it made me feel like I needed to apologize to those who had longer durations without power, like I had somehow paid off the power gods to give ours back sooner. You’d see a handful of people on social media saying it ‘must be nice’ to have power when, in reality, it was totally random.

9. After a long and cold winter, it’s amazing how good 45 degrees feels. I immediately grabbed my fall jacket to head out into the sun. As bad as the blizzard was early in the week, having several days of temperatures in the 40s did wonders for melting the snow. It also did wonders for the psyche of a lot of us in New England. It honestly has felt at times like winter was never going to end, but now hopefully (knocks wood) the worst is behind us. Those who live in warmer climates wouldn’t understand when we get a 40+ degree day and drive with our windows down and start drinking iced coffee. Yes, we’re kind of crazy, but in a charming way.

10. With my content being more visible on Instagram and TikTok in the last month or so, I am starting to try to put a little more effort into my videos. This means taking a few b-roll shots, doing camera cuts, and trying to turn a 90-second to 2-minute video into a short film. Sure, it might not make much of a difference in the long run, but it actually is fun and gets me some practice in a director’s sense and a layout sense. This video of the damage at Town Neck Beach in Sandwich is an example of what I’m talking about.

11. As I have said many times, when it comes to photography, I practice something called dedication to the craft. That is the idea of getting the photo you want, even if it means disregarding your own safety. Obviously, my risks are calculated, but they are still risks for a good shot. The older I get, the more my practical side starts to take over. I have always seen a few moves ahead in life, and now I have found that seeing those moves can stop me from doing something stupid. For example, and obviously you knew there was an example, this week I went shooting down in Chatham. While at one location, I noticed in the distance on a deserted stretch of beach, there was a grounded boat. I immediately knew I needed to get closer to it. I went to a place called the Monomoy Wildlife Refuge. It’s way out in the boonies of Chatham. From there, I could see the boat and knew a route I could take to get pretty close to it. Sadly, the last few years have seen this location decimated by erosion to the point where there is no beach access from it anymore. Well, technically. Here is the seeing moves ahead part. There is an overlook where you can see the ocean, but the stairs that used to lead you to the beach have been removed. If you walk to the edge of the bluffs, it’s probably a 10-15-foot drop down to the beach below. A few years ago, I’d have jumped off the bluffs, walked the beach, and gotten some sick photos and videos of the boat. Today though, the idea of jumping in the snow and sand and then trying to figure out my way back to the parking lot, all while hoping nobody who lived on the bluffs saw me and decided to make a scene, was all too much. If it hadn’t been winter, I’d have walked to an access trail a half-mile away, but the temperature and time of day wouldn’t allow it. I had to settle for a video from a distance, lame.

12. I like putting captions with all of my videos on social media. It helps people who might not be in a place where they can play a video with sound. As you’d expect with AI deciphering my words, there are lots of inaccuracies, specifically with proper names and locations. This week, I shot a video at the Cape Cod Canal. While I was there, a helicopter flew overhead, and I got a fun shot of it. When I went to add captions to the video, I noticed odd words appearing. While uploading it to TikTok, I noticed a few Arabic words in my captions. Then, when I put the same video up on Instagram, I noticed the phrase ‘oh my god’ was randomly thrown in. It took me a moment to realize that the AI was trying to make words out of the helicopter sounds. So apparently TikTok thinks helicopter noises sound like Arabic, and IG thinks they sound like someone crying out, ‘oh my god.’ Both random and funny at the same time. I did momentarily debate leaving those captions in, but ultimately took them out.

13. I got lucky and experienced a classic Cape Cod sunset on the tidal flats this weekend. All of the ice had melted away, and it looked like it does in the summer. I had a great idea. I would shoot a killer time-lapse video of both the tide rolling in and the sun setting. I used my selfie stick, which is also a tripod, and set my phone up probably 6-7 feet away from the water’s edge and let it roll. I had hoped that the water wouldn’t come in too far before the sun had dipped below the horizon. I watched the video recording, and the water rolled in. It started lapping at the tripod, but I held firm. It began trickling past the tripod, but I wouldn’t relent. I held out as long as I could, but once the water was 5 feet past the tripod holding my phone, I had to rescue it. If I had waited a few moments later, I don’t know if the water eventually would have knocked my phone over. The video was amazing, though. Probably 5 minutes of filming for less than 30 seconds of time-lapse.

Saturday, February 28, 2026

1996 Changed Everything: The Rise of the Internet

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 first one, we look at how the rise of the internet changed society as a whole.

This year marks thirty years since I graduated from high school. It is a line of demarcation in most people’s lives. It’s a symbolic finish line crossed. The only difference is that once you cross this finish line, you are face-to-face with a wide-open horizon. The possibilities are endless, and also terrifying.

I find it poetic that the year I graduated from high school, 1996, feels like a line of demarcation in the world as well. It was during this same time that the world was changing. Much like when your life goes from high school to being in your 40s, sometimes in a flash, the world went from analog to digital in a snap.

The World Wide Web first became available for the general public on April 30, 1993. We didn’t know it at the time, but the countdown was on to the change in how we see and interact with each other and the world as a whole.

My family got our first computer, a Gateway model, early in 1996. It was just in time to have a bit of a leg up on my final months of high school work. Those first few weeks and months saw little change. I wasn’t on the internet all the time. Living in a house with four siblings did limit my screen time. The ball was already rolling, though.

I have heard so many people around my age say that the 1990s were the last decade to have a feel and a look. I agree, but can’t put my finger on why. It may be because it’s the final decade before technology went fully digital. Your opinion may vary.

Think about it. What is retro chic today? 80s and 90s fashions and trends. Thirty years from now, do you think kids will be clamoring for whatever the style is today? What is the style today anyway?

The day I first went online, I still listened to CDs, watched VHS movies, watched cable television on a boxy CRT TV, and talked on a phone attached to the wall. Granted, the phone was cordless, but still. The ability to find any bit of information or converse with people from anywhere was something my 1980s-kid brain never could have comprehended.

The reason I see 1996 as the jumping-off point might be because it’s where I come in as far as internet access goes. It also perfectly lines up with a major life change, as far as high school graduation. However, there are stats to back it up.

In 1995, only 14% of Americans had internet access. I was not one of them. In 1996, that number jumped to between 20-23%. By the time 1999 ended, it was estimated that as many as 50% of Americans had access to the Web at home, school, or work. In less than the time it would have taken me to go to a four-year college, internet access more than doubled. From there, it was off to the races.

Instant messages became preferable to telephone calls. Digital MP3 songs became easier to manage than huge analog music collections. Websites topped libraries for school research. Why go outside to play when you have dozens of friends inside in a chat room?

All of these changes are necessarily bad. They are, however, huge shifts in societal norms. Then again, shifts in society happen all the time. I think they seem more dangerous and egregious when they’re happening to the generations after you.

I am sure my great-great-grandparents couldn’t understand why my grandparents wanted to waste their time with automobiles, radio, and motion pictures. I am sure my grandparents couldn’t wrap their heads around Beatlemania, the Hippie movement, and television. I know that my parents thought my friends and I wasted time with loud music, video games, and extreme sports. Now my generation is the parents, and the music, fashion, and viral trends all seem odd. The point is, we all enjoyed something that our parents thought was dumb.

At one point the automobile was seen as a weird passing fad.

A big part of me never wants to become as close-minded and ignorant as my father, so I do my best to try to understand the who, what, and why of today’s generation. My nieces and nephews are good barometers for that. I don’t need to stay ‘hip’ or relevant. I don’t need to know the words to some random K-pop group's songs, or understand GenZ slang (although I understand ‘slay’ because of my niece Emma). I don’t need to recreate TikTok viral trends because I’d come off as a near-fifty year old man trying desperately to cling to straws of youth.

A reason why I think that 90s kids have adapted so well to the changing landscape of the 21st century is the fact that we got the best of both worlds. We got childhoods free of social media, cyber-bullying, online gaming, and homogenized music (sorry). We were also still young enough to learn and adapt to the rise of the internet, online lives, smartphones, and more.

I might have grown up without the internet, but I have lived more than half of my life with it now. I was there for the rise of America Online, Napster, RealPlayer, Hotmail, AIM, Ask Jeeves, guestbooks, Trojan viruses, and pixelated videos that took ages to download. I am comfortable fully immersed in a digital world, or sitting looking at printed photos, reading a book, and listening to a CD. Yes, I still have my entire analog music collection, just nothing to play it on.

1996 truly was a life-changing year, not only for me but for millions of others. I graduated from high school while many others graduated from analog to digital. The world can be cyclical, though. I have noticed in the last several years a growing number of people looking to pull back from their digital lives and retrieve some of their old analog selves. Maybe that’s why I never got rid of my CD’s? I always have the option to take a step back and remember who I was back before the internet rose to prominence.

This was a subject I wanted to talk about for a while. The strange timeline where my graduation and the rise of the internet intersect. I am also a sucker for nostalgia; it’s kind of my thing, so I didn’t need much prodding to do a deep dive into life back then. All it took was a blizzard and no power for a few days to remind me of living in 1995. No laptop. No smartphone. Just me and my mind to help me escape from boredom. I think we all need that sometimes.

Thursday, February 26, 2026

In My Footsteps Podcast Episode 233: Defunct Bookstore Chains, 60's & 70s Lunchbox Culture, Dating/Love Game Shows(2-25-2026)

Order a copy of my acting debut film, Cape Cod Cthulhu!

Some popular bookstore chains that have since gone out of business. Kids lunchboxes in the 1960s and 1970s. The fun and ridiculousness of dating and love game shows.

Episode 233 puts a wrap on the month of love.

The show begins with a look back at defunct bookstore chains. These were some of the heavy hitters in literature retail but have since gone by the wayside. Many an hour were spent by 80s and 90s kids reading as much as they could and then not buying anything. Did you frequent any of these stores?

We take a trip down memory lane with a look back at all things lunchboxes in the 1960s and 1970s. What they were made of. Who was on them? What was inside of them? How the wrong choice could spell doom for your school popularity. Don't forget to pack your Thermos.

To end the month of love we have a new Top 5 going through some of the most fondly remembered, and some downright bad, love and dating game shows.

There is a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule looking back at the cloning of Dolly the Sheep.