Men’s wallets hold a weird fascination for women. It’s a classic flirtation or early date move for a girl to grab a guy’s wallet and rifle through it. Theoretically, this is a pretty major invasion of privacy, but I’ve never seen a guy do anything but either put up with it or enthusiastically give a tour of the contents. Smart phones, particularly iPhones, invite the same sort of browsing. What apps you got?
So though this post may be narcissistic by definition, I figure somewhere out there, someone might find it mildly (very, very mildly) interesting to know what’s on my bookmarks bar.
ADP. Pay statements, yo. I’m pretty anal about tracking my finances. (Being responsible with them? Not so much. But I track them like Tonto.) I don’t get physical stubs, so I have to go to this site to enter in my deductions and whatnot. Thrilling!
Aviary Lounge. I do promotion work for them, and I built this site. I maintain it and write most of the posts and then spam the hell out of Facebook and Twitter using a Wordpress plugin. In exchange, I get a place to drink for free and the ability to show movies once a week.
Meetup. I run the Foreign Flick Fridays at Aviary (see above) and belong to Young Austin Wine Lovers and a chat group that meets every other week to discuss New Yorker articles.
Twitter. Follow me @icrywolf and you’ll find out that I have no idea how to effectively monetize social media in an increasingly interconnected economy that’s all about leveraging personal brands, and I don’t care.
Gowalla. It’s local to Austin so I try to use it instead of Foursquare and you couldn’t get me to use Facebook Places with a loaded gun. Pretty much deprecated, but if I ever want to visit my pixelated collection of latte icons, I can do it with a single click.
Five banks I use. I can only take personal divulgence so far.
Grocery Gadget. For a while there, V and I were all over the meal planning and careful grocery budgeting. Then, I got tired of spending 90 minutes at the grocery store to pick up one meal’s worth of items. A decent service and app but too involved for the typical working schlub.
The B-Movie Message Board. An actual message board. I’ve frequented it for nearly a decade, but lately I’ve been swallowed by feeds and now I only pop in on occasion to read movie reviews. Still, I love its regular members like brothers (and a few sisters), and it’s an island of civility in an Internet full of 12-year-olds.
Kongregate. Loves me some free Flash games. Keeps me from making stupid purchases I can’t afford, like an X-Box or video games that cost money or, you know, a TV. Plus, I’m a sucker for badges.
Rotten Dead Pool. A fun yearly game in which you guess who will die. If you get more right than anyone else, you … I don’t know, actually. Doesn’t matter. Out of 10 possible picks, I’ve never had more than 2 right answers. Want to live? Allow me to predict your death. I visit often because the sidebar serves as a handy distillation of TMZ-style pop culture news without making me feel all dirty or, worse, AOL-y.
The Sixty-One. Wonderful music discovery service that has replaced any desire I have to visit Pandora. Plus, I think it has one of the most innovative website designs going. I’ve long since abandoned the “game” aspect of trying to get points and bump artists. Now I just browse and enjoy.
We Are Hunted. A Billboard-style chart that highlights most-downloaded emerging artists. Comes across as a pastiche of various indie and hip-hop genres and does a better job of capturing current Top 40 zeitgeist than The Sixty-One.
Go Music. Just because I happen to have a Russian music downloading service linked, it doesn’t mean I circumvent any laws. I use it like an IMDB to look up what new albums are coming out. Just for that. What?
Netflix. This really cool video renting and streaming service I belong to. You should check it out! Now fully Mac compatible!
MLB.com. Baseball has done a fantastic job of making me not need a TV with this service. When I can afford the $10 for the streaming feeds of every game, I’m in hog heaven.
The Hardball Times. While Fangraphs is totally more fun and updates more frequently these days, I still keep a link to this site for old time’s sake. I published an article on realignment once. Their annual books are a must read for any sabermetrician.
Woot! One of these days, they’ll post an iPad for $50. Until then, I just read the daily promos for an example of great comedy writing. Seriously, these guys give The Onion a run for its money. Reminds of the late, great Girls Are Pretty heyday.
Craigslist. For all my adult services needs. What? They what? Well, I guess I can find apartments there, too.
Demand Studios. I do some freelancing for them when I feel like I’m dead broke, and I felt dead broke a lot when I was between jobs earlier this year. I’m not sure how I feel about the content mills, but this one pays the best, so it’s got that going for it.
Austin Hash House Harriers. I’ve only hashed three times with them, because they run on Sunday afternoons, and I don’t know if you’ve heard this about Texas, but it gets killer hot here. One of these days, I’ll have to get back out to a full moon run, though. Jordass for Men must live on.
Jabootu’s Bad Movie Zone. I designed this site, too, and I’ve got a half-written article for it that I really should finish one of these days. Ken Begg is one of my heroes in the b-movie criticism world, and he’s a sweet guy to boot. When I can make it to B-Fest, he’s one of the people who makes the trek to Chicago worthwhile.
ChrisMagyar.com. The fact that I’m blogging on Tumblr should tell you everything you need to know about this site. I always swoop in and clean off the cobwebs when I’m unemployed, then become embarrassed by its presence and let it go fallow again. Nice to have a vanity e-mail address, though. And I certainly can’t let the domain fall into the hands of evil Street Fighter Chris Magyar.
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