Another cop-out in a way but I thought people might find this interesting. See, I didn’t really like history in school. Even in college I was a slackass despite my art history minor - visual memory is a completely different thing for me. It wasn’t until I didn’t really have the pressure to memorize dates and names and had access to A&E and its spinoff channels that I really became interested in history. Probably the visual thing again.

Even though I was fascinated by women in history, art history in particular, it wasn’t until the late nineties that I started taking it fairly seriously. That’s when I started gathering information for a book about the women in American Art - African American Women Artists in particular. There is a ginormous pile of stuff I’ve gathered over the years. And essays I pick up and write on every once in a while. Scans and reproductions. And, as I’ve said before, a respectable private collection of books on the subject. Who knows if my little history book will ever be published but even if it never is I wouldn’t say it was a waste of time.

So far the only time I’ve ever been paid for my interest in history was when I worked for a website that recreated historical houses in (ready for this?) The Sims. Yeah. How nerdy can someone be to take such a popular video game and make it not just into building digital dollhouses, but digital historic dollhouses. Hehe. How punk rock am I? Ok, so not really.

For the most part I created more modern houses in a particular style and mid-century re-creations. And some of you are already familiar with the eerily accurate re-creation I made of our house. My main job was usually to identify and document all the little downloaded doohickeys my buddy Gigi used when building her houses. This was no small feat, she had thousands upon thousands of object, wallpaper, and floor files. Several gigabytes worth. And I would have to remember who made each one and where to download it. The good news is that a person with visual memory was particularly useful for that job.

Yes, people paid to download these houses and I would provide links to all the stuff they would need to go download somewhere else to have it work properly. That might seem strange to non-gamers out there but people spend money on their hobbies and this was just another weirdo hobby. For my knitting friends: think of it as paying for a really good pattern but still needing to get the yarn and needles.

You might be asking “Noelle, what the hell does this have to do with Catherine the Great?” or maybe “Will you stfu about this history stuff and post more knitting and spinning?” For those of you with the second thought I have a great knitting post today I just have to take photos.

There was a bio about Catherine the Great on the Biography channel last night and I remembered the huge reproduction Gigi made of Alexander Palace, which Catherine built for her grandson, and Catherine Palace, which was restored and heavily redecorated during Catherine the Great’s reign but had originally been built for Catherine I.

So I thought you all might find that odd architectural view of Catherine the Great’s life interesting. You don’t have to pay to look at the screenshots but you still have to pay to download it. So just go peek at the screenshots and check out how a couple of gals took a nerdy hobby and made it even nerdier.

We’d all wandered off to other interests by late-2003 or so. After receiving a cease and desist from the Jekyll Island historical society and then the director of the Ivy Green museum (even though the floorplans in both cases were likely in public domain) our hearts just weren’t in it anymore. There was a brief migration to a free server with a more modern slant but it didn’t hold our interests like the historic reproductions did. Kind of sad but we enjoyed it for a while.

In the unlikely event that you’re interested in some of the houses I made that remain free to download you can still join my extremely old Yahoo Group. I actually won a few awards for those houses. I guess I should add that these are all for the original Sims games with all the expansion packs that were available up to the point the houses were created. I never installed the last expansion though.