Just kidding.
I block them by putting a transparent cup over them, slide an open book cover beneath where they stand, so that they must enter on top of it, close the book, and off we go - I, the book, the cup that I press with all my force, and the spider trapped inside - to the nearest opening in the building, wishing them the very best on their new way of life, outside, and for me to live and thrive.
In my apartment, and I swear this is not a joke, most of the time I use "NoSQL - A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence - Distilled", as my main transport mechanism.
Anyway, to the point. Similarly interesting behaviors of spiders include using web vibrations for communication and sensing, apparently even including tuning. You can easily google (is this still a cool way of saying "search"?) related articles, just ignore the web apps Vibrations API article on the MDN.
The problem is that if this plane is semi-stiff, it's hard to put your hand under it without making an opening between it and the glass. And that is not a risk I'm willing to take.
So the trick is that I slide something thin (the cover itself), but then can, as a second stage, put the rest of the book there, by closing it. But true, no reason those two layers must be a part of the same thing.
Today someone posted Show HN for a catalog of problems looking for better solutions. Maybe I should submit there?
We keep these under every sink because they tend to appear in tubs for us. Only problem is spiders that run fast, it’s hard to capture them without injuring them.
Bram Stoker's Dracula had a particularly good bodyhorror version of this in the multi-bodied "Woman".
Imagining the psychology of aliens evolved from ambush predators
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16a9m2h/ima...
You mean like television ads showing scantily clad women to get you to spend all your income on <insert product here>? Looks like the spider learned from us.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(2013_film)
When I saw it I also thought of the Australian beetles that hump beer bottles until they die, because the size, color, and texture of the beer bottle resemble a particularly sexy female beetle and they just can't help themselves.
The human equivalent might be an AI generated image of woman(or man) so attractive they cant exist.
TBF, for most of the spiders that we find in our homes, the risk is only psychological, not physical. That said, I prefer not to make physical contact. My nephew though, he plays with them like they are puppies.