Celeste - Intermediate Contest 2024 - The Void - AdUMMY (DNF)

Map: gamebanana.com...
I could not finish this map. I encountered black holes once when I first started playing custom maps, and I couldn't handle them. Turns out I still can't. I'm beginning to gather that they might have some kind of analog input dependence, but whatever the case my experience is that they are wildly inconsistent and amplify error a lot. The last room of this map ends with a lot of extremely precise moves that I couldn't get just right even with save states. There was no chance I would be able to chain all of that together into a single run. There were simply too many segments that seemed to have no consistent solution strung together back to back. I'm struggling with a lot of the same things that I'm struggling with in psychokinetic, but they are so much worse here. I kept accidentally doing some kind of ultras at 15:59 because I would sometimes just get launched too high for a wavedash, and other reflexes would start to kick in.
When I first played the base game I had this problem to a lesser extent with clouds and lava blocks, and it was in part a knowledge issue. I'm not sure with black holes if there is a trick to making them consistent that I'm supposed to know. They present as a linear mechanic. My expectation is that they are running a rudimentary gravity simulation where the way they affect your movement varies continuously with your relative position, which basically turns them into potent error amplifiers. A one-frame variation in position results in larger and larger deviations with each successive frame resulting in wildly different paths from nearly identical inputs. This is what I expect to see, and this is what I observe. In general it makes sense to have at least some kind of soft chunking of outcomes from an interaction with an entity. The grace period at the end of a cloud's bounce means that you can jump immediately after the end of the bounce and know that you're going to get the maximum height instead of trying to time your jump as close to the top of the bounce as possible without being late. It's a non-linearity that turns it into a reliable mechanic that can be used with some precision. Lava blocks have something similar with their bounce directions at least quantized. It would make sense to have something similar for black holes, but given the nature of the entity, it would kind of make sense not to. So I don't even know if it's reasonable to imagine that this is a knowledge issue.
Anyway, I loved the screen wrapping stuff. I felt like the floating blocks were often kind of iffy, and maybe contributed some to the wild variation in black hole behavior I was seeing. Sometimes I felt like maybe I was being trained for dream hypers a little with wavedashes directly out of the exists of dream blocks. I like the stuff that has you set up for a wavedash either dashing upward or coming out of a dream block upward. There was some of that using black holes to fling you into the refill that wasn't too bad (e.g. 3:22).
edit: While working on the final room I had a similar experience to psychokinetic where I feel like there's something I'm missing that explains why things aren't working. Typically, in psychokinetic, if some move doesn't put me in the right place it's because I've omitted another move earlier in the route and just don't have the right speed. It feels like that ought to be the case here too. There's some move I'm missing or not doing just right earlier in the map that's causing my speed to be wrong, so the black holes fling me in the wrong directions. It starts to feel like I need to be solving the speed building puzzle, which can't possibly be the case for a red intermediate map. That accidental ultra chain that kept happening at the end felt a little intentional. Like it's there on purpose. But that's a story for another time.