In My Footsteps Podcast Episode 251: Passing Fads of the 2000s, Terminator 2, Origins of CGI, Huey Lewis & the News(7-8-2026)

 

Donate to the GoFundMe for my feature-length film, The Cabin!

Passing fads from the 2000s. Terminator 2, 35 years later. The origins of computer-generated imagery (CGI).

Episode 251 brings the cool breeze of GenX nostalgia to the hot July weather.

It all begins with a staple of today's entertainment. Computer-Generated Imagery, or CGI, is commonplace in the 2020s. So much so that it can be taken for granted. It had to begin somewhere, and we're going to look back at the origins of CGI, which go back further than you might realize.

Hasta la vista, baby! 35 years ago this week one of the greatest sci-fi films, and one of the greatest sequels ever, was released. Terminator 2: Judgment Day broke the mould of what a science-fiction film could do. Great characters, incredible effects, tremendous acting, and more. We will do a deep dive into this iconic 90s film.

The Top 5 heads way back to the bygone days of the early 21st century. We are going to look, laugh, and shake our heads at some of the passing fads of the 2000s. Were you guilty of partaking in any of them?

We have a brand new This Week In History and Time Capsule, of course, looking at the life and career of 80s rock legend Huey Lewis.

To support me and the show, become a member on Patreon. 

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

Helpful Links from this Episode

• Buy My New Book, In Their Footsteps!
• Searching For the Lady of the Dunes True Crime Book
• Hooked By Kiwi - Etsy.com
• DJ Williams Music
• KeeKee's Cape Cod Kitchen
• MSFTS Community
• Kingfisher Hotels Cape Cod
• Christopher Setterlund.com
• Cape Cod Living - Zazzle Store
• Subscribe on YouTube!
• Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog
• CJSetterlundPhotos on Etsy

Listen to Episode 250 here

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #128: Mall Rat Reboot, Heat Dome, Hey A Loveseat, etc.

1. Those of you who regularly read this blog know that over the last few months, I have had several dreams involving friends and family. The common denominator of these dreams is that they all have taken place at a mall. It feels like it was the Cape Cod Mall in the 1990s, at least in my dreaming mind. I mentioned after the last one that maybe the dreams were telling me something. Like maybe I needed to go to the mall to find an answer to some question. Well, this week I bit the bullet. While out for a drive, I took a detour and went to the mall. I wandered the corridors from one end to the other for the first time in years. Did I find some meaningful answer to some important question? Nope. Did I see anyone I knew? Nope. Did I stop and find some amazing deal on some product I didn’t know I needed? Nope again. I got some steps in, but all in all, it turned out to be me feeling old walking around, seeing mostly teenagers hanging out. It did make me happy that kids still carry on the tradition of being mall rats. Oh, and I did get some tasty Chinese food from a place called Ruby Thai, which I hadn’t had in a while. If that was the meaning of the dreams, then mission accomplished.


2. Maybe I’m different, but it’s never crossed my mind to take trash from where I live and go leave it outside somewhere. Sadly, it’s common to see full bags of trash left on the side of the road by people who are the definition of worthless. The ones that take the cake are those who bring furniture somewhere and just drop it off. Seriously? If it’s too much money to pay to bring it to the dump, maybe switch to cheaper beer or cigarettes. I guarantee people who drop a loveseat in the parking lot of an abandoned school have an open pack of cigarettes and an open can of some crap beer in the center console of their beat-up, rusty pickup truck. I say all of this because, yes, on Monday Runday this week, I found a discarded loveseat in the parking lot. Next up, it’ll be mattresses and televisions littering the school grounds.

Have a seat

3. Normally, Monday Runday is pretty self-explanatory. We run. We go home. That’s it. This week had a few interesting developments. I just mentioned the loveseat. Besides that, there was a conversation with an osprey. Where we run is a slowly decaying track at an abandoned school, as I mentioned. Located behind the school is a wooden platform commandeered by a family of osprey as a home. As I was running my first lap around the back of the school, I spotted one of the parents sitting in the nest and sharing many high-pitched squeaks. I made sure to stop and explain to it that I didn’t have any fish and also didn’t speak osprey, but sadly it didn’t understand. The second time around, I got to see a pair of the young ones. Their heads popped up and were bobbing all around. I had to be 30 to 40 feet away, plus the tower was probably 30 feet high as well, so I never felt in danger. Although when the other parent returned carrying dinner in its talons, I did make a hasty return to running.


4. My brain still believes I am 30, but my body will vehemently disagree sometimes. Monday Runday was a huge success. Granted, I only ran about half of the time, but it was 4 miles in total, and my body felt good. I felt the mix of exhaustion and energy that I love about running. The next morning though, I had to pay the piper. My body wasn’t really sore, just really tired. My knees, especially, felt like they needed a few extra hours of rest to work normally. I felt like a crushed bag of potato chips. I definitely don’t regret running more than I have in a few months. Still, I am glad that I was smart and held myself back during that run. If it were 7-8 years ago, I’d have run way too much since I felt good and ended up injured. Now I held myself back and yet still felt like a half-eaten rotisserie chicken tossed in a dumpster. Forgive me, I was trying to find the funniest food-related descriptions for some moderate soreness. I was gonna say a pizza flipped upside down on a hot street, but the chicken one was funnier, at least to me.

My body felt like one of these things

5. As the week got going, there was a foreboding sense of dread in the air in the northeast. Something called a ‘heat dome’ was approaching. Temperatures were set to be higher than they had been in many years. Predictions ranged from the low 90s to the mid-100s, depending on where you lived. I am very familiar with heat waves. They are prolonged stretches of hot weather that vary depending on where you live. I just find it kind of funny how language changes over the years. When I was a kid, there were no heat domes, there were no bomb cyclones. There were heat waves, Nor’easters, and blizzards. I know that things evolve. Maybe I am now the old man saying things were different in my day? I feel a bit like meteorologists think weather can be boring, so they invent new, scarier-sounding types of weather so that they get attention. Honestly, what sounds more impactful, a heat wave or a heat dome? It sounds like we’re going to be sitting in a rotisserie. Don’t get me started on other weird ones like atmospheric river and polar vortex.


6. Amazingly, despite it being in the low 90s to kick off the heat wave this week. We had two people signed up to use our infrared sauna at my work. The sauna is great for overall health, but not on one of the hottest days of the year. Of course, inside our office it’s a comfy 72 degrees, so it’s doable. I said that we should just put a lawn chair outside in the sun and place a sign next to it that says ‘sauna.’ Maybe we could shine red lights in their faces to make them feel more like a real sauna. Once it got up over 90 degrees, though, both people ended up calling in to cancel. I guess they built their own lawn chair saunas in their yards.



7. You don’t realize how much you depend on your phone until you go home from work for the weekend and realize that you forgot your charger in the office. There was no chance I’d be driving back into work to get it, so I decided to go the following morning and buy a backup charger. I know I’ll always need one. I went to Ocean State Job Lot since it was close and cheap. Just a reminder that it was Fourth of July Weekend, so everywhere was packed, and outside it felt like standing in an oven. I was thrilled to just get into the a/c and wander the aisles at Job Lot. Once it got to be ten minutes and I had wandered nearly every square inch of the store without finding charging cables, I broke down and actually asked an employee where they were. As you might figure, they were located in the one place I hadn’t checked. Oh well. Then it was option overload. Instead of choosing a typical cord, I got a fancy charging pad. Granted, it was $7.99, but still fancy for Job Lot. What I thought was that it was a pad with a plug so you could have it on your desk out of the way. In a way, it was. In another way, it was a pad with a USB cord to plug into a laptop. Of course, that defeated the purpose of the charging pad. It also came with the same USB I’d have needed for my phone anyway. I am guessing the charging pad will collect dust while I just use the cord. Nice.


8. Stepping outside into the soupy air on a day when the heat index got up as high as 107 is not fun. The sun was brutal even just walking across a parking lot. In fact, it was so unbelievably hot that the asphalt smelled like it had just been laid in certain areas. I was only outside for a handful of minutes on the hottest day of the bunch, but that was enough. It was capped off by seeing the hydrangeas outside of the front door where I live totally wilted. They literally looked like they had melted. Sadly, I wish I had gotten a photo of them when they were still fresh and alive. You can see for yourself the damage the heat wave did. The good news was that they recovered fairly well when the temperatures got a little more seasonable.




9. For all of the injuries over the years, I am at heart still a runner, and still foolish despite my increasing age. That meant that even though the heat index was over 100, I had to get some miles in outside on the 4th of July. It’s a bit of a tradition to run or walk to the water and feel good about myself because I can run faster than the cars stuck in traffic can move. This was not like other years, when I ran a lot of fast miles. I wanted to experience the full heat as safely as I could. This naturally meant running in the sun for stretches of my time outdoors. Even relatively early in the morning, it felt like I was inside a pizza oven. I never worried about myself, though. For years, I ran in extreme conditions, and to be honest, I kind of enjoy the idea of being out in weather others would avoid. I ended up doing five total miles of running and walking. There was a lot of beautiful scenery along rivers, and I made sure to wave to as many people as possible. Except not to those stuck in traffic, they were having a hard enough time as it was.


10. Every year on July 4th, they have the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest. That’s all fine and dandy as long as nobody tries to refer to people who gorge themselves on food as athletes. Training to eat dozens of hot dogs is not the same as training for anything athletic. I would never attempt to do a hot dog eating contest. I like hot dogs and could probably down several in a sitting without issue. My reason is that I want to enjoy my food. Jamming bread and meat into a glass of water to slide it down my throat doesn’t sound enjoyable. That being said, I did have my own eating contest on the 4th. My mom made her typically excellent pasta and meatballs. She made me a gigantic plate to take home. Rather than divide it up into two medium-sized meals, I figured, why not try to be a champion and eat all of it? The photo of my plate is below. All you need to know is that in the process of getting all of that food from the container to the plate, I managed to spill some on my table. It was quite a mess, but hey, that’s what soap and paper towels are for. Yes, I finished all of it and quickly fell into a food coma after. I might not have the ‘prestige’ of winning a hot dog eating contest, but I guarantee you the food my mother made was light-years better.




11. And then the bubble burst. After three days of 90+ degree heat and soupy levels of humidity, the heat dome finally cracked. The rain came pouring in overnight on Saturday. I was thrilled to wake up the following morning with the temperature only being 67. My air conditioner got to sleep in. To celebrate the heat wave ending, I took my tired legs out on the bike trail in the morning. Yes, it was still raining, but only lightly. Plus, after having dealt with a heat index of over 100 for a few days, running in the drizzle was heavenly. I chose to go down the bike trail extension, which when completed, will lead the Cape Cod Rail Trail from Yarmouth west into Hyannis. It is pretty much all paved, but the final step is the bridge set to be placed over the busy Willow Street. The footings of the eventual bridge have been built. I am figuring that they are going to wait until after summer or even until the end of the year before they finish the project. That’s my guess, although judging by the Barnstable town website, it might not be done until 2031. By that logic, it probably really won’t be done until the day after I die, yay.


12. I have been sharing and promoting the fundraiser for the feature film I will be producing called The Cabin. It’s been a month, and as of this writing, I am 1/3 of the way to the proposed budget. At this point, I am looking outside of the box for places to share the fundraiser. It had never dawned on me to look for fundraiser groups on Facebook. My friend, producer Frank Durant, suggested that, as he’s done it before. One such group has nearly 300K members. I’m not setting my expectations too high, but even a few new donors from that page would be great. The actual GoFundMe page on Facebook has 2.5 million followers. It’s a huge number, and you can message them to get support for your fundraiser. My issue is that even though this project is extremely important to me, it is not important in the grand scheme of things. What I mean is the fundraisers they share on the GoFundMe page deal with medical bills, housing, and things that are far more serious. I haven’t shared my fundraiser because, next to fighting cancer, donating to a small indie film fund doesn’t seem that meaningful. I’ve still got five weeks until I close the page. I’m thinking sometime in the second week of August to give me and the crew a little time to shore up all of the budgetary needs. It’s all new and out of my comfort zone, but that’s what makes it exciting.

In My Footsteps Podcast Mixtape #4: Weirdest New England Laws of All-Time(7-1-2026)

 

Donate to the GoFundMe for my feature-length film, The Cabin!

Happy Fourth of July Weekend! 

In addition to cookouts, beach days, fireworks, and family fun, I have a new mixtape to share with you.

Mixtape #4 shines a hilarious light on some of the weirdest laws ever on the books in each of the six New England states. 

It was illegal to throw pickle juice on a trolley in Rhode Island? It was illegal to walk backward after sunset in Connecticut? It was illegal to whistle underwater in Vermont? Cows had to wear diapers in New Hampshire? You couldn't place advertisements in cemeteries in Maine? You couldn't bring a rooster into a bakery in Massachusetts?

These are just a few examples of some of the weirdest and oddly specific laws that were on the books in New England.

Whether you're from one of these states or looking and laughing from afar, you all can enjoy some good head shaking at what was considered illegal back in the day.

I hope you all have a fun and safe Independence Day weekend!

To support me and the show, become a member on Patreon. 

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

Helpful Links from this Episode

• Buy My New Book, In Their Footsteps!
• Searching For the Lady of the Dunes True Crime Book
• Hooked By Kiwi - Etsy.com
• DJ Williams Music
• KeeKee's Cape Cod Kitchen
• MSFTS Community
• Kingfisher Hotels Cape Cod
• Christopher Setterlund.com
• Cape Cod Living - Zazzle Store
• Subscribe on YouTube!
• Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog
• CJSetterlundPhotos on Etsy

Listen to Episode 250 here

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #127: Monday Rainday, Business Cards, Relax or Else, etc.

1. Monday Runday was Monday Rainday this week. I will take a little rain over 85 and humid, though every day of the week. It was fitting, though, that after just over 3 miles of circling an old school track in varying intensities of rain, the water stopped. My legs were tired, so I had no plans to run to reach my desired 3 miles. I just had to walk faster and endure the rain. One thing I have been very happy with is the durability of my headphones. I have had the same pair of big red over-ear headphones for going on 8 years. I know that someday they will break and I will need a new pair, but that wasn’t the case on this day. The rain didn’t short them out, although I didn’t risk it, and when the rain got steadier, I took my headphones off and hid them in my shirt. Years ago, at my peak as a runner, I used to enjoy running in all sorts of inclement weather. I’d run in rain, wind, snow, whatever. I guess since I ran all of those races and ran in all of the different types of weather, I have lost the desire to do so again.


2. One day this week, I was training an 87-year-old client. She was brought by her daughter-in-law and also had her 7-year-old granddaughter in tow. I have known them over the years at my work, as the daughter-in-law is a patient at my work. The 7-year-old I have known since she was a toddler, and I give her free rein to come into the gym if I am training someone and she is there. On this day, she was just hanging out while I trained her grandmother. This was after she and I failed to find a rogue cricket that had been calling the gym home. Anyway, I was training her grandmother, and so she grabbed a dry-erase marker and started scribbling on our green dry-erase board. When she left, I saw what she wrote, and it was so sweet and cute that I decided to leave it up there. I won’t erase it, but there’s no guarantee it won’t be erased. The fun coincidence was that her other grandmother was a client of mine in the afternoon. She practically melted when I told her who wrote that sweet message. I won’t leave you in suspense. I did take a photo of it to share.




3. No matter how many speaking events I do for my books, I will always feel blessed and humbled. I am always happy that people, the vast majority total strangers, take time out of their day to come out and hear me speak. That’s why I do my best to make each and every event the best I can possibly do. This week I had an event at the Eldredge Library in Chatham. Despite it being a sunny, 80-degree day in early summer, there were close to 30 people who chose to come inside, sit, and hear me speak about my latest book. In Their Footsteps: The Interesting People, Places, and Events of Cape Cod History features 40 stories from the Cape, all in chronological order. It was a fun event, and I have a few more this summer. Come and see me on July 15th at 5pm at the Snow Library in Orleans, or on July 23rd at 6pm at the Dennis Public Library. They will both be great shows, I promise!

Coming up next!

4. This week marked the 250th episode of the In My Footsteps Podcast, which I have hosted since November 2020. It’s amazing to think that the idea I had once, my brain had cleared after giving up alcohol, would have such staying power. It began as a way to distract myself from the alcohol demons I was fighting off. It was just me talking about all of the subjects I enjoyed. Slowly, it morphed into my favorite thing I do. I actually love the research, planning, recording, and yikes, even the editing of these podcasts. A podcast is easily the best way to keep in contact with your audience. You can speak about anything you want, and I bet you’d find people interested. A lot of it comes down to time. Doing all of the work surrounding the podcast can be time-consuming. If you’ve ever thought of starting your own podcast, all you need is some sort of computer, recording software, a decent microphone, a topic, and the desire to create it. My show is now strictly GenX nostalgia, but that covers a ton of ground. It ends up being nearly anything that has occurred between 1960 and 2005. You can see why I believe that I can easily do another 250 episodes. If you’ve never listened, now is your chance to start. They are fun and breezy at around an hour each. Thank you to those who have listened, and here’s to the next 250 episodes!



5. What do you do with outdated business cards? In 2009, I created my first business card. It featured Chatham Lighthouse and simply described me as an author. This was despite not having any published books or even a blog. For some reason, probably because it was a better deal, I had something like 500 cards printed. They lasted me until 2017. By that time, I had 4 published books, so a change was needed. I bring cards to my speaking events because they are a way that people can possibly keep connected, even if they don’t buy a book. The most recent cards I had made were when I had 6 published books. I now have 10. I am currently in the process of designing new cards that I should have for my next event. The outdated cards are something else. Around the time I redesigned my author cards in 2017, I also created personal trainer cards. I thought I might be able to drum up business for in-home training if I had my own business cards to hand out. I might have had 100 made, and in the 9 years since, have probably handed out less than 20. That means I have a boatload of cards with a photo of me from 2014 promoting something I have no desire to do again currently, that being in-home training. Oh, but wait, there’s more. I also created cards for my podcast. Again, about 100 made. The problem is, since I printed those, I changed not only my podcast logo, but what the show is about in general. So those are even more useless than the training cards. Yay. I have something like 150 useless business cards. I might keep one of each and then send the rest through the shredder at work.


6. Family get-togethers used to be a regular occurrence when I was younger. Now they have become fewer and further apart. Despite having a pretty busy schedule for the most part, I try my best to make time if a family get-together is on the horizon. This week I was able to do so. I went to have dinner with my cousin Patrick, who was still on Cape Cod from Las Vegas. We were at our cousins Richard and Dale’s house. They are our 2nd cousins. It was a wonderful and worthwhile experience. The weather was perfect, so we all ate outside. I sometimes forget that Dale used to run a restaurant on Cape Cod decades ago and is an accomplished cook. She just casually whipped up a Bearnaise sauce, Greek salad with dressing, and fresh whipped cream like it was no big deal. I was tired from a busy day, but didn’t want the dinner to end. At this point in my life, I do realize that you never know when another family moment like that might happen. Even when the sun was starting to go down after 8pm, I stood out in the driveway with Patrick and just talked about anything we could. It was a battle between fatigue and genuinely wanting to stay and chat as long as my body would hold up. I am grateful for these moments today, when, as a kid, they were so common that I felt almost as if I could miss a handful and not miss a thing. Patrick says he might come back to Cape Cod next year, but you never know what happens, so I am glad we got a lot of chances to spend time together during this visit. If you are lucky, you end up with many family members that you would rearrange your day just to spend some time with. I am that type of lucky.




7. Every time I go into a certain local supermarket, if a specific employee is working there, they always say hi to me. Not ‘hi’ like they’re just going through the motions, but saying it like they know me. I see this guy who has to be maybe a few years older than me, going about his job, but nine times out of ten, if I pass by him, he stops and specifically says hello to me. He even occasionally asks how things are going. I am sure he is probably just friendly, and he does the same thing with other customers, but I don’t have any other employee at any other supermarket do that. Part of me wants to stop and ask if we know each other, but I doubt it. He never says my name or asks anything more specific that might make me think we have a history. Believe me, it’s not a bad thing. I’d much rather have someone go out of their way to say hi to me than the alternative. I could only imagine having someone shoot me a dirty look every time I was in their store.


8. When I was at my peak as a runner, probably 2015-2016, I used to run sometimes as much as 40 to 50 miles per week. I definitely had my share of aches, pains, and injuries, yet somehow I kept going year after year. Once I injured my right hip while training for a Top 10 finish in a 5K in 2018, things changed. The injuries tipped the scales, and slowly but surely, my running career faded. I kept trying, but it was an exercise in futility. A few years ago, I made a concerted effort to return to running races. I at least wanted to do one, even if my time was nowhere near what I used to be able to do. I competed in three races between 2024 and 2025. The last race I did, my time was something like 6 minutes better than I expected. My confidence was sky high. Only a few weeks later, I severely sprained my ankle and everything shut down. I haven’t run a race since and haven’t run much at all. In the last month or so, I started wondering if there was anything that I had done when I was at my peak as a runner that I might be able to add back into my life that might help me start running more. Two things came to mind. One was making BCAAs (branched-chain amino acids) part of my daily life. They help muscles recover from strenuous exercise. The other was adding more glucosamine to my supplement regimen. It helps with the lubrication of joints and overall joint health. When I was running 40+ miles a week, I took more than the recommended dose of glucosamine regularly, and my knees and hips always responded well. I figured it was worth a shot to try that again. It takes two weeks or so to get the full effect of any vitamin or supplement into your body, so I didn’t attempt anything before then. I have noticed in the time since I started taking 1.5x the recommended amount of glucosamine that my joints, specifically my knees, feel better than they have in quite a while. This came to a head this weekend when I went for a long walk. It was like my legs were craving running, so I gave in. It wasn’t like it used to be. There were no stretches of sub-7-minute miles. But I did end up running much more than I have in months. There were even points where I thought I should stop and walk, but my body was on autopilot like the old days. I just kept running and focusing on my stride. Only time will tell if this is a significant development in my running life or if it’s my brain tricking my body until something else breaks. Either way, it felt good to be running on a beautiful summer morning on Cape Cod again.


9. It’s amazing how a little dose of the old runner’s high can make a route I’ve gone down hundreds of times feel fresh and new. A favorite running route leads along a river to the beach. It’s through a historic village and is in total just over three miles from my front door to the ocean’s edge. When I was a competitive runner, I’d enjoy the route but be more focused on my pace. Now I can stop and take it all in at times. Little coves, flowers, loads of walkers and riders, historic homes, and ample beachfront views. I figured, why not create a little video of this route? You never know who might get inspired to check it out themselves. You can drive it if you want, but walking or cycling is better.




10. In recent weeks, I have started to try to make Sundays into a day when I don’t do anything major. I make it a day where I sit around and relax. No exercise, no content work, just mindlessly recharging my battery. It’s not that I’ve lost the desire to work hard on my content or enjoy some sort of exercise, but I have found that if I never relax, I feel like I am in a constant state of fatigue to start my new work week. My brain automatically goes to projects I should be working on. I admit I will do some minor work, like posting links to projects on social media. However, more involved things have to be put on the back burner at least for a day. There have been long stretches over the last 5 or so years where I have felt in a state of perpetual burnout. My energy levels crater, and I get agitated at that. A month or so ago, I decided to force myself to sit and relax all Sunday. I did this by binging several episodes of the Netflix series Dark. I felt for so long that if I wasn’t constantly working on something, I’d fall behind whatever imaginary metric there was to show my progress in creative fields. Now I have come to realize that if I don’t take at least a day to fully relax and recharge, it could lead to longer stretches where I just can’t keep that pace up physically or mentally. Not just for me but for anyone, make sure you take some time, some real time, to relax and recharge. It will do you a world of good.