Amazon's coercion

Amazon Prime membership offers an increasingly attractive range of streaming video. From my perspective this includes Mr Robot, Preacher, The Man in the High Castle, The Americans, Le Bureau des Légendes and probably more. Under ordinary circumstances I would be seriously considering subscribing.

Unfortunately, further to my previous criticisms of Amazon's website of recent years, on top of my one about the checkout experience making me work ever harder to not join Prime (indeed, I'm still not a student), in recent months they have been listing various products (some previously generally available) as being exclusively for Prime members. This latest instance of obstructive heavy-handedness galls me and I thus do not consider rewarding their crass manipulation as they intend: I instead want their unhelpful money-grubbing behavior to backfire. They don't get to pretend to be a useful online marketplace then sucker me into a membership club: choose one or the other then plainly be that instead of frustrating and disappointing me by straddling the middle with cheap tactics.

Additionally, Amazon's reliability has also been declining for me, perhaps due to sellers for whom they distribute: recent incidents include fresh food that was many weeks out of date and an item that was mailed a week later than claimed and arrived outside the promised delivery window. However, that issue may just be bad luck: I don't order enough to have statistical confidence in that decline. I still use them at all only because they consistently issue a refund when I complain but better for all of us if they get it right first time.

Rather than their site being one that tries hard to sell me things for which I wasn't looking, I want to use an online vendor who makes it easy for me to find and buy the things I want.

Vital signs

My diastolic blood pressure reading is often in the 80s, what the Americans call prehypertensive. That name not sounding encouraging, I was hoping that frequent exercise might improve it but I don't notice any downward trend. Still, my resting heart rate seems to have dropped: I haven't read it being over 70bpm for over a year now.

Shower spider

I was surprised to find a spider in the shower cubicle this morning. As I shower daily I thought that there would be a U-bend typically water-filled, presenting a barrier to creatures entering via the drain. Perhaps I am mistaken, or maybe the spider simply made its way into the shower from some other part of the house, though we typically keep that bathroom door closed because the cat has a penchant for stealing our dirty underwear (Phase 3: Profit) from therein.