I managed not to hurt it as I brushed it off.
Spiders are cool and all but I do have a personal rule of if it enters a certain radius around me, it is gonna fucking die.
I love these little spiderbros. We get them on our front porch and nearby areas all the time. They demolish things like earwigs for us when they’re dumb enough to get that high, and regularly handle bigger mosquitoes. They do tend to kill a lot of moths though, which isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing for humans.
They’re also chill as hell. Having a habit of building webs near the door, I’ve walked into many of their masterpieces and had them suddenly appear on my face lol. Never a single nip, and they’ll gladly move to a hand that’s placed in front of them and be moved to a new spot. Wouldn’t recommend handling spiders in general, but these are about as human neutral as it gets. They just don’t see us as enough of a threat to bite unless you mess with them heavily.
We’ve had generations of them now, all building webs in the same area. It’s really fucking cool tbh. Like, hundreds of these having lived out their lives in harmony with us, never causing problems, usually helping out, and being beautiful along the way.
Hard to tell without a good look at the abdomen, but I think this is a barn spider. The bite isn’t bad for humans. They are very creepy cute when resting, they fold their legs up and become a kind of diamond shape.
Edit: It looks like both Neoscona crucifera and Araneus cavaticus are commonly called barn spiders. I linked to the first but the second is the namesake.