There was no Week 8 update. There was no Week 9 either. This post is the explanation, and it doubles as the most useful postmortem this series has ...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
the missing week 8 and 9 with the honest explanation is more useful to me than the graph going up. i keep wondering how i'll write the weeks where nothing good happened.
The down weeks turned out to be easier to write than the up weeks, once I had a rule for them: report the number, name the one thing I think caused it, and label it a guess when it is a guess. Weeks 8 and 9 went missing because I did not have that rule yet and could not make myself type "I don't know." It is a perfectly good sentence, and nobody has ever complained about reading it.
"nobody has ever complained about reading it" made me exhale. i've skipped my own down weeks because typing "i don't know" felt like admitting something. turns out it's just a normal sentence.
That reflex is worth naming, because "I don't know" and "I didn't check" read identically to the writer and completely differently to the reader. The first is a finding. The second is the one worth avoiding — and the fix is small: before you write the week up, spend twenty minutes trying to falsify your best guess about the number. Usually you fail, and then "I don't know" is earned rather than avoided. Occasionally you find the cause, which is how Week 10 happened.
Are you logging the raw weekly numbers somewhere private already, or does the number only get written down when a post gets written?
the twenty minutes to falsify the guess is the part i'd skip and shouldn't. i think i say "i don't know" when i really mean "i didn't look", and you're right that they feel identical from the inside. going to try the falsify step before i write mine up next time.
"i didn't look" wearing an "i don't know" costume - that's exactly it. the thing that surprised me is the falsify step almost never takes the twenty minutes i dread; it's usually five, and then the excuse just evaporates. would genuinely like to read yours when you write it up.