So i was watching grimdonuts's speedrun tutorial, and he indicated that you needed to turn vsync off to fly properly. When I did so, I went back to practice the beginning of the game, and apparently the flagpoles in basic braining would only activate when vsync was on. Am I missing something in my settings that makes it work right?

With an uncapped framerate and vsync off flagpoles are likely to do that. You can either turn on vsync before runs and turn it off when you enter the caravan area in brain tumbler, or use a program to cap the framerate. Grim has a good video explain this and how to cap your framerate here:

Thank you so much for this!

The video is gone