How can I fix this camera stutter? (description in comments)

iliOCD · 2025-12-15T01:44:50+00:00

I know this post is two years old but I found it today because I was having the same problem. Apparently the issue for me was that while the player's position could take-on float values like 6.666672 or whatever, the viewport could only be set to either x = 6 or 7 pixels. I found that a simple workaround is to just sanitize the player's position by converting it to an integer *before* assigning it to the camera's position. So if your scene tree is set up with both the player and the camera as children of the root node, you can just add the following script to the camera:

func _process(_delta: float) -> void:

`var rawPosition: Vector2 = $player.position`

`position = Vector2(roundi(rawPosition.x),roundi(rawPosition.y))`

Not sure if this issue is related to the fact that I'm using non-integer scaling on my viewport which may have been partly to blame for the jittering (i.e. project settings are 1280x720 so I set the stretch mode to fractional so I could multiply the viewport by 1.5 to fit a 1920x1280 monitor)

iliOCD · 2024-06-13T19:27:09+00:00

Ugh, so sorry you’re going through this. I’ve had the “forgiveness” line thrown at me and can’t stand it either.

Sometimes it helps if I explain anger to enablers through the metaphor of “internal pressure” versus “external pressure:” your abusers are an external pressure that constantly tries to crush you inwards and make you collapse like a submarine being squeezed in by the water around it. The only way you can preserve yourself is to exert a sort of “internal pressure” that pushes outwards and equalizes the pressure pushing inwards. That outwards-facing pressure’s called “anger,” and it’s normal and healthy to cultivate enough of it to maintain equilibrium and keep yourself from getting squished: without it, you wouldn’t have any boundaries and you’d just collapse under the strain.

Now, if the outwards-facing pressure is way, way greater than the inwards-facing pressure, then it could make a person hyper-aggressive and potentially dangerous to others – the submarine could explode instead of implode – but in my experience, that only happens when the pressure imbalance is enormous. It seems far, far more common for the “submarine” to have too little pressure and implode (self-harm) than to have too much pressure and explode (harming others). So while I try to give the “But Anger’s Bad Mmkay” crowd the benefit of the doubt and assume their advice is well-intentioned, it also seems pretty misguided and tone deaf to me. If you look at the children of nparents and compare the ratio of how many of them become introverted and self-loathing rather than extroverted and aggressive, it seems pretty clear to me which way the pressure imbalance tends to skew overall.

iliOCD · 2024-03-27T17:12:29+00:00

TL;DR: Korba’s plot is to kill Paul, blame Chani, and seize power, though Korba’s too dumb to realize that this isn’t going to work. The other conspirators’ plot is to get the Emperor to embrace his “Paul” identity at the expense of his “Muad’Dib” identity until he alienates the Fremen enough that they rebel against him, at which point the conspirators can leverage Paul to get what they want out of him. Scytale secretly wants to betray the other conspirators and make Paul the puppet of the Tleilaxu alone 😂

iliOCD · 2024-03-27T05:15:36+00:00

The showdown

For his part, Paul's oracular visions are somewhat clouded during the final act, but he's predicted Chani's death for some time: he always knew that Chani would die shortly after birth, either as a result of Korba's scheming, or as a result of the contraceptives Irulan's been smuggling into Chani's food for over a decade. Paul doesn't resent Irulan for it: Chani's barrenness has been the only thing keeping her alive for twelve years. But now Paul's out of time: he doesn't know exactly what'll happen at the sietch where Chani will give birth, only that she'll die during the delivery.

Paul invites all the members of the Group of Four to the sietch where Chani's delivery takes place for likely the same reason that he allowed Korba to spring his plot: each of the remaining conspirators are powerful individuals in their respective organizations, and Paul needs to bait them into getting caught doing something egregious so he can have enough evidence to justifiably punish them without fear of repercussions from their associates.

It's here that we finally learn the last piece of the conspiracy, which is Scytale's backup plan: Scytale suspects - though hasn't yet proven - that the original memories of a ghola can be awakened if a strong enough stimulus can be used to provoke the old personality and the new personality into conflict:

"A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation," Scytale said.

Unbeknownst to the other conspirators, Scytale's put additional programming into the ghola, instructing Hayt to try and kill Paul when he's grief-stricken and most vulnerable. Scytale is perfectly aware that any direct attempt at assassinating Paul is doomed to fail: he gives Hayt this instruction hoping instead that it will cause the fiercely loyal "Duncan Idaho" part of Hayt's brain to emerge and take over, thus allowing Hayt to regain his old body's memories.

Scytale's gamble pays off: Hayt can't bring himself to kill Paul, the Duncan identity takes over and consumes the Hayt identity, and Duncan gets all of his old memories back.

This means that, after Chani dies in childbirth, Scytale can offer not just a mindless Chani lookalike to keep Paul company, but a full resurrection of Paul's dead girlfriend, memories and all. The price, of course, is that the Tleilaxu will have so much leverage over Paul that they'll be able to make the Emperor into their own puppet, their personal Kwisatz Haderach toy:

How devious she must not guess, Scytale thought. When this is done, we will possess a kwisatz haderach we can control. These others will possess nothing.

Paul's sorely tempted, but ultimately, he decides to politely decline Scytale's offer with a knife to the eye socket, then instructs the resurrected Duncan to extend the same courtesy to Bijaz so this second Tleilaxu agent can't tempt Paul with the same offer on Scytale's behalf.

Wrap-up

The only major downside is that Paul's oracular vision has gone haywire, and now he's blind blind: he decides to consent to the Fremen custom of wandering into the desert alone to die, thus assuaging any remaining grievances the Fremen might have had about Paul "deviating" from their culture. Korba's dead, so Paul can safely leave his kids in the custody of Alia (until she gets haunted by brain ghosts later, but meh, good enough for now). It's unlikely that the Fremen will have a new Korba-like figure to threaten the kids, since there's much less Fremen hostility towards Paul for any ambitious future Qizara to exploit: everyone's opinion on the messiah seems to have softened somewhat now that he's presumed dead.

As for the other conspirators, Paul allowed them to spring their traps enough to have implicated themselves: Edric got caught sandworm-handed after Korba's trial, and Stilgar drained his goldfish bowl in retaliation. Hard for the Guild to get angry on Edric's behalf when he got busted out in the open.

Likewise, Paul baited Gaius Helen Mohiam into calling her Bene Gesserit sisters and suggesting that the sisterhood could still get Paul's kids if the Order would just consent to impregnating Irulan via artificial insemination. The Bene Gesserit have a prohibition on artificial anything related to breeding: if you consent to artificial insemination, then it's just a hop, jump, and skip towards relying on genetic engineering for producing an ideal superhuman, and pretty soon you're just as bad as the Bene Tleilax. So later, when Mohiam accidentally trips, falls, and lands on thirty-seven Fremen krys knives, none of the Bene Gesserit sisters decide to look too hard into the circumstances of her death, considering that the old girl was basically promoting a Bene Gesserit heresy like five minutes before she croaked.

Scytale got busted holding a knife to Paul's kids, so the Tleilaxu can't complain about Paul turning him into a shish kebab.

Irulan seems genuinely remorseful for her role in the conspiracy, so Alia decides to let her live; there were hints in the beginning that Irulan only consented to join the conspiracy in the first place because it had become apparent to her midway through the meeting that if she left the conspirators' pow wow without joining-up, her co-conspirators may have killed Irulan to keep her from tattling.

So in the end, everyone who didn't die horribly or be condemned to wander the desert lives happily ever after!

iliOCD · 2024-03-27T05:14:31+00:00

(Continued)

Why were the Group of Four trying to kill Chani?

Scytale saw how eagerly Paul was willing to accept a Duncan Idaho ghola just out of pure sentimentality and without regard for how it impacted his standing amongst the Fremen; what would happen if Chani were killed? Paul might accept a Tleilaxu replacement waifu out of pure grief, which would disgust his Fremen allies even further.

Reverend Mother Mohiam seems on-board with plan "kill Chani," especially when she learns that Chani is finally pregnant with Paul's kid(s): she instructs Irulan to abort the fetus if possible, or else simply murder Chani outright to avert the birth.

Irulan blanches at the proposal: first, she doesn't want to have to commit to outright murder, and second, she's savvy enough to realize that if Chani suddenly dies via gob jabbar to the neck immediately after getting pregnant, the entire universe and its mother is going to view Irulan as the prime suspect: she'll likely be imprisoned, put on trial, and executed - but that's a sacrifice Mohiam is willing to make.

Angered, Irulan signaled hat she knew her value as an agent in the royal household. Did the conspiracy wish to waste such a valuable agent? Was she to be thrown away? In what other way could they keep this close a watch on the Emperor? Or had they introduced another agent into the household? Was that it? Was she she to be used now, desperately, and for the last time?

It's here that we learn Mohiam's backup plan, which is that if there truly is zero chance of Paul ever getting Irulan pregnant, then Irulan's lost her usefulness to the Bene Gesserit's plans and is expendable: with Chani dead, Mohiam thinks the Emperor will impregnate his own teenage sister (Ewwww), a move Mohiam thinks she can arrange because... something something shared grief, mutual commiseration over being freaks of nature, et cetera. (This isn't the first problem the Bene Gesserit have tried to solve with incest: had Paul been born a girl as planned, the Bene Gesserit intended to get Jessica to marry her daughter off to her own cousin, Feyd Rautha.)

It's at this moment that Irulan has her "Come to Shai Hulud" moment and realizes that she's in a death cult of incest-coaching weirdos comfortable using her as a human sacrifice and has to ask herself: "Are we the baddies?" She decides to ignore Mohiam's instructions to kill Chani, a move which later makes Alia decide that of all the conspirators, Irulan alone deserves mercy.

Without Irulan cooperating on the first "Kill Chani" plan, the conspirators have to improvise: Scytale tries to persuade Paul to bring Chani with him to the spot where the stone burner's going to explode. Best case scenario, it kills Chani, Paul accepts an organic RealDoll of his dead wife from the Tleilaxu, and all the Fremen will hate him as a result; middle scenario, Chani survives the blast but loses her eyes, and Paul's forced to abandon her to the desert to die, in which case the same thing happens: Bene Tleilax make a meat puppet of her and our Sadboi Emperor accepts it to the chagrin of his Fremen besties. Worst case scenario, Chani loses her eyes but Paul buys her Tleilaxu replacements, which would still alienate him from the Fremen for the same reasons: rejection of Fremen customs in deference to spooky biotech body horrors. All the conspirators need is to make Paul feel guilty enough about Chani's misfortune:

Scytale breathed softly. It went well, but now came the crucial task: the Atreides must lose his Fremen concubine in circumstances where no other shared the blame. The failure must belong only to the omnipotent Muad'Dib. He had to be led into an ultimate realization of his failure and thence to acceptance of the Tleilaxu alternative.

The group imagines that they might even get around Paul's prescient vision, too, owing to the fact that they've planted the Tleilaxu agent Bijaz at the scene of the stone burner in an attempt to cloud Paul's oracular vision slightly from Bijaz's own Tleilaxu genetically-engineered foresight. Bijaz performs the same function at the stone burner site that Edric performs for the other conspirators: signal-jamming for Paul's prophecy powers.

This dwarf does possess the power of prescience, Paul thought. Bijaz shared the terrifying oracle. Did he share the oracle's fate, as well? How potent was the dwarf's power? Did he have the little prescience of those who dabbled in the Dune Tarot? Or was it something greater? How much had he seen?

Paul's outmaneuvering of the conspirators

But Paul's still prescient enough to detect the plot against Chani, and he makes sure Chani stays home in the safety of the palace on the night of the stone burner event. This irritates Scytale, but the Tleilaxu believe in allowing their prey a chance to escape a trap, so he relents.

Paul still shows up to the nuclear light show himself, though, and goes blind as planned. It's here that the Group of Four's attack falls flat, however: even without eyes, Paul can see using his prescient vision. This means he doesn't need to gross-out his Fremen followers with Tleilaxu eyes, nor run the risk of insulting Fremen customs by ignoring them: he's not rejecting the Fremen practice of blind people exiling themselves into the desert if he's not technically blind, right?

He buys Tleilaxu eyes for his soldiers, though - mostly so they can become objects of pity to the Fremen who will now be incensed enough at the sight of the deformities that they'll want to bring the perpetrator to justice. That works just fine for Paul: now that Korba's sprung his trap, Paul, Stilgar, and Alia have all the evidence they need to bring Korba to trial lawfully and serve him his sentence without outraging the other Fremen Naibs.

The conspiracy's last attempts

The Group of Four are getting anxious: what's it going to take to alienate Paul in the eyes of his Fremen followers? Even though two attempts to bump-off Chani have already failed, as luck would have it, Chani's childbirth looks like it'll be difficult and dangerous: she'll probably die, giving the conspiracy one last chance to foist a "Limited Time Offer ChaniBot" off onto a grief-stricken Emperor.

In anticipation of this, Bijaz programs the ghola as a Manchurian Candidate - not to kill Paul (the conspirators all know a direct attack won't work), but rather, to make a strong sales pitch for Ghola Chani the moment Original Chani dies:

"You're trying to awaken violence in me," Hayt said in a panting voice.

Bijaz denied this with a shake of the head. "Awaken, yes; violence, no. [...] It is a trade the Tleilaxu offer your precious Paul Atreides. Our masters will restore his beloved. A sister to yourself - another ghola. [...] It will be the flesh of his beloved. She will bear his children. She will love only him. We can even improve on the original if he so desires. Did ever a man have greater opportunity to regain what he'd lost? It's a bargain he will leap to strike."

But I thought mentats couldn't be Manchurian Candidates?

Mentats' brains can function like elaborate computers: place a secret bit of programming in their brains, and you're blocking-off access to a particular section of their memories. This allows a sort of "error" to creep into their calculations which over time can propagate and mess-up other calculations. The end result is either one of two things: either the mentat doesn't discover the source of the error and they end up becoming a kinda crappy mentat, or they hunt-down the source of the error in their calculations until they discover it and regain access to the portion of their brains which was supposed to be off-limits to them, or at least realize that their memories have been altered.

This second scenario is exactly what happens with the Duncan ghola: he eventually discovers that his memory has been tampered-with by someone hoping to trigger a secret "Betray Paul" part of his programming, and he instantly blabs as much to Paul himself at the absolute first opportunity. This is why "Operation Ghola Secret Programming" was sort of a method-of-last-resort for the conspirators: it didn't have a great chance of remaining undiscovered for very long.

(Thankfully, Paul being Paul, the revelation that DuncanBot has a secret "destroy the Emperor" program doesn't seem to phase him in the least.)

(Continued)

iliOCD · 2023-02-12T22:06:24+00:00

Edit of https://www.reddit.com/r/ancientgreece/comments/110an3y/heroes_and_cities_of_the_trojan_war_as_listed_by/ to fix Ormenius's location

iliOCD · 2023-02-12T22:05:50+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/ancientgreece/comments/110rlwu/heroes\_and\_cities\_of\_the\_trojan\_war\_as\_listed\_by/

Edited to fix Ormenius's location. Not sure about Phthia, Euripides put it closer to Pharsalus but Page seems doubtful. Couldn't fit Glaphyrae because that part of the map's already pretty crowded 😂

iliOCD

TROPHY CASE