"pasttime" is a good description. On slow HN days when there is less interesting content to me on the front page I'll check out my favorites and then have an "holy cow! I have so many interesting articles I need to catch up on" moment :-)
What I would really like to do when I have some spare time is write a browser extension that will randomly inject a few of my favorite links into the HN frontpage for me so I can passively revisit these posts and discussions I've saved.