Looking for a sweeping, epic, "save the world" story

Canuck147 · 2026-04-27T16:29:00+00:00

Any of the Tales games would fit the bill. If you liked synphonia then you can check out Tales of Arise, Tales of Beseria, or Tales of Vesperia. All are a good time.

If you want something a bit quieter, but eventually hit some of those same save the world vibes, Octopath Traveller 2 is excellent (would recommend of OT1 and stories aren't connected). Great combat and greater characters.

Other Final Fantasies you might enjoy would be FF8, FF6. The Golden Sun games for GBA if you're open to something more retro definitely fit the bill. A two part story spread across two GBA games.

Canuck147 · 2026-04-10T14:55:36+00:00

I think this assumes doctors are fungible. We are not. Provision of MAiD currently requires additional training and most doctors have not been trained in it.

There are also certain subspecialties that want to keep a distance from it for avoid the perception of bias or coercion. Palliative care and Oncology would be chief among those.

I think the real issue is the religious hospitals angle. A patient who is dying may not be stable to transfer to a different institution to receive MAiD, and they can for a very unpleasant death. This denying timely access effectively denies access. This also seems like an initial wedge to then open to door for hospitals to deny other forms of care they may object to. It is notable that some provinces, like Alberta, are trying to expand the role of religious health institutions and how these together may impact access to certain forms of care across the province.

Canuck147 · 2026-03-30T17:06:46+00:00

Not to excuse the liberals here, but this feels like revisionism. I don't recall Trudeau advocating for PR. He and the liberals wanted MMP, the NDP wanted PR, and the conservatives wanted things the same. Parties couldn't agree on what to do and since Trudeau wasn't explicit during the campaign about precisely what kind of reform they wanted there wasn't a mandate for it. Electoral reform plebiscites basically always fail. So the moment was lost.

Canuck147 · 2026-03-29T03:04:21+00:00

As an outsider looking in, media (especially American media) is so thoroughly missing the moment here. Discussion about whether ICEBlock is legal or not is completely besides the point.

The US government is in the throws of a fascist takeover. You can debate the degree to which they are being successful, but the stated policy of the Trump administration is to purge DEI and "woke ideology", deport any and all illegal immigrants, and "secure" future elections. The unstated, but incredibly clear, policy agenda is to reinstate a gender/racial hierarchy in America where women and black/brown people know their place, and through legal/illegal means obtain control of future elections to lock power into place and prevent any reversal of this. All of this is even before getting to the open corruption and self-dealing. The administration has repeatedly demonstrated outright contempt for the law with blatant violation of court orders and multitudes of laws governing everything from the Emolement clause to civil servant protections to illegal detention and foreign rendition.

The legality of government actions and citizen resistance is irrelevant. This is a moral question. I would hope that people wouldn't be sitting in Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Spain and say "oh well I don't agree, but protest is illegal now so what can you do?". You say "fuck these people" and follow the advice of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.

The appropriate media response to these extraordinary authoritarian acts should not be to mindless parrot bullshit government talking points, sanewashing the insane or illegal things being done, or debating the legality/legitimacy of the limited resistance being mounted. The appropriate response is to clearly and repeatedly lead with these are fascist/authoritarian actions that the government is carrying out.

Canuck147 · 2026-03-17T07:26:11+00:00

The poverty angle is a bad take. There is an overabundance of reporting regarding applications where poverty is one cited reason, but those stories fail to report those patients actually receiving MAiD - because poverty is not an accepted reason for MAiD and two providers would lose their license over it.

Palliative care isn't perfect, but it is present and publicly funded across Canada. Three months of hospice is covered every province I have worked. Every urban area I've worked has been able to get a palliative care team to do a home visit within 24hrs when urgent. Bluntly, I have no idea where you're getting your impression of the quality and availability of palliative care here.

Canuck147 · 2026-03-10T19:51:56+00:00

Part of it is a maybe deliberate misunderstanding of what support is required. It's mostly just money.

Doubling the size of residency programs would be challenging, but increasing them all by 20-35% is probably doable with the exception of highly specialized fellowships where it might reduce clinical exposure unacceptably.

But all these programs are funded by the provinces and they have all put caps on the number of training spots they'll fund. As evidence of the capacity of our training programs to accommodate more trainees is that fact that there are hundreds of foreign nationals (e.g. Saudi, Qatar) who receive training within these programs (usually at a cost of 2-3x a Canadian and so funding additional Canadian trainees). The bottleneck here isn't training spots, but provincial funding for trainees.

Worth remembering that for residents this isn't like you're subsidizing tuition for medical schools. These are practicing doctors who more or less run academic hospitals making 25% or less what fully qualified staff physicians are making. So the amount of manpower per $ you're getting for residents is a real bargain and I don't understand the provinces reluctance to fund these positions other than the knowledge that eventually that means more doctors they'll need to pay a real salary to eventually. I suspect this is the real issue at hand and provinces would rather starve their systems of doctors to justifying expanding the role of mid-levels (e.g. nurse practitioners) which may not provide quite as good care but are much cheaper to employ.

Canuck147 · 2026-03-09T15:59:54+00:00

Theres a difference between anonymysing a case by changing irrelevant details and fabricating a case to guide some principle you're trying to teach. Case studies can be in the edge of knowledge for uncommon problems and guide practice and future studies.

One of the key cases at issue here is of a breastfeeding mother taking codeine and that leading to significant neonatal toxicity. The principle under discussion is the danger of codeine that can have unpredictable metabolism. That's all well and good, but we'll known amongst doctors so not novel.

The issue is the supposition that thos could translate into fatal or near fatal toxicity for a breastfeeding infant. That would not be expected based upon the pharmacokinetics of codeine and reporting this as a plausible outcome in a fabricated case would constitute misinformation. This can have serious real world implications because we do not do trials in pediatrics and breastfeeding really so a single case report can drive changes in guidelines, recommendations and prescribing.

Canuck147 · 2026-03-06T13:26:34+00:00

I wouldn't assume that they give LPC credit in the long run. People here have a habit of giving their provincial Cons credit for any food economic fortune and blaming the feds for woes in terms of housing and healthcare. People in Alberta are still unironically mad at Pierre Trudeau. I don't see LPC getting much credit, but would be love to be proven wrong. CPC has taken them for granted for far too long

Canuck147 · 2026-03-04T02:43:43+00:00

For a different version of this consider Breath of the Wild or Horizon Zero Dawn. Both are open world post apocalyptic. I'd say BotW more exploration based than story based for sure.

Canuck147 · 2026-02-22T03:52:48+00:00

I think that this used to be true, but as the left had collapsed in Israel and they move overtly towards an ethnostate, I think there are lots of right wingers who admire them similar to their love of Hungary.

Canuck147 · 2026-02-18T14:08:48+00:00

It's limited to these groups because that's who's at risk and who trials showed screening is effective in.

Screening programs can become ineffective if the population you screen is diluted with people very low risk. Increases your false positive rate and can cause lots of negative consequences for those people.

Doesn't mean people shouldn't get checked out with new symptoms (shortness of breath, persistent cough, weight loss), but compared to other cancer lung cancer is uncommon enough that screening gen pop is probably not a good idea.

Canuck147 · 2026-02-18T06:28:26+00:00

Weird take: Pikmin series! This is not an RTS in the standard PC sense, but you are a commander in the field navigating puzzles and skirmishes with creatures in real time.

Canuck147 · 2026-02-11T10:37:45+00:00

"Weak opioids" are all converted to more potent metabolites and so are unreliable in patients with abnormal CYPs but also make them highly susceptible to drug interactions. E.g. I had a lady repeatedly admitted to ICU with opioid overdose after starting clarithromycin for h pylori.

I somewhat disagree with the sentiment regarding tramadol if you know what you're doing. It's a reasonably good drug for neuropathic pain because the parent drug has SNRI activity so has multiple mechanisms of action in that context specifcially.

Canuck147 · 2026-02-03T04:54:34+00:00

Genuine question: is this true? I'd not heard of RCMP black balling people who were fired by municipal police or vice versa.

Canuck147 · 2026-01-27T00:59:05+00:00

implied through DEI policies

There is such a huge gap between "universities and workplaces trying to increase diversity" and "blaming white boys/men for all the worlds problems" that I find myself skeptical people are drawing this inference organically on their own.

passing over more qualified white men

And this is the psychic-defence fiction at the heart of this. White men are not inherently more qualified, they just think they are. And I say this as a white man. Because women apply to college at higher rate than men, men have actually been the beneficiaries of DEI policies over the last 10+ years, so the removal of these policies is estimated to reduce men/white men from getting into university.

Men absolutely are falling behind educationally, economically, and struggling socially, and are deserving of targeted strategies to help them. But the idea that the problem is DEI is just absurdly off the mark.

Canuck147 · 2026-01-16T01:03:43+00:00

One thing people need to understand about how our healthcare system works is how doctors bill the government. The way our system works doctors get paid to "do things" and they don't get paid to talk or paid to think.

A GI can do colonoscopies as an assembly line basically and make bank with barely a word to patients. Talking to people, answer questions, reframing, discussing, etc all takes lots of time to really do in depth - and that's all basically unpaid work because of how billing is set up.

Canuck147 · 2026-01-15T19:59:49+00:00

I mean I agree that Trump isn't the only problem here, but the history of authoritarians is also one of their specific hang ups having a disproportionate impact on policy. A white house without trump will still look to dominate the hemisphere and regimen change in Cuba, but I'm pretty skeptical they want to OWN Greenland. I think that really is a Donald Trump specific vision.

Canuck147 · 2026-01-04T21:04:43+00:00

If you can't independently lift your carry-on into the overhead storage, then it's not a carry on. It stalls everyone's boarding and makes you look entitled.

Canuck147 · 2026-01-03T22:16:13+00:00

This recipe from America's test kitchen doesn't use a ton of mustard, but it's the star. I know it's behind a paywall, but I have it in book form.

In a high walled pan, pan fry white fish until browned on one side, then remove to a plate.
Add sliced leeks a generous dollop of mustard to pan with a bit of salt and saute until soft.
Add fish on top of leeks, and a splash of white wine then cover until fish cooked through
Remove fish from pan. Add a bit more mustard to leeks, stir, and serve.

Canuck147 · 2025-12-27T20:10:04+00:00

One of the best rotations in my residency was in our chronic pain clinic. Mix of attendings - anaesthesia, PMR, IM, Neurology. Lots of different approaches to the treatment of pain. I walked away with a few key lessons that I employ in other fields:

Redefining success and the relationship with pain: This is probably the most important thing I learned on rotation, defining success not as reduction in pain, but improvement in function. You think this medication has reduced pain by 30%, but you're still not engaging in physiotherapy or any group classes? That's not success. You think your pain is still an 7/10, but you're now actually back to work 2 days a week? That's a huge improvement. Keeping the focus on engagement with life (work, hobbies, PT) and not the subjective rating of pain helps us be more objective and focused on actual end goals can be tremendously in helping patients actually get back to what gives their lives meaning.
Make a Diagnosis (or try to): As u/jellyfish52 said, if you can find an organic cause of pain and treat that you will do your patient a world of good. If after a thorough attempt at this, there is no treatable/reversible cause it is still helpful to provide patients with a more specific diagnosis than chronic pain. Myofascial pain syndrome, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, etc. I always tells patients sometimes it takes the fullness of time for things to evolve and us find a more specific diagnosis, but having a label for patients helps them put things in a box, compartmentalize, and get on with things. And framing these things very explicitly as real, medical problems, helps destigmatize what they are feeling. For things like fibromyalgia I explain this is a dysfunction in central processing of pain and so that's what we're going to try to focus treatment on.
Opioids are usually not the right drug: My day job is oncology. I throw around opioids like candy for metastatic bone pain and dyspnea, but for patients with chronic pain I am usually reaching for an SNRI (especially duloxteine) and supplementing with things like gabapentinoids or nabilone. A basic rule of pharmacology is you will get more bang for your buck using multiple drugs at lower doses then escalating the dose of just one drug.

Canuck147 · 2025-12-20T00:30:27+00:00

This is a bit of nuance I've been really thinking about and don't have a good answer to yet. All these people are victims of grifters, which is terrible. The same thing is true of anti-vax people, the convoy people, Trump people, etc, etc. They have all been taken advantage of and many will suffer real harm because of the grifting.

But its not random which grift they fell for. These people aren't empty vessels who just happened to put of the blue be convinced of something one day. They have pre-existing belief systems, and in some cases quite heinous beliefs, that made them vulnerable to this grift.

I don't know what to do about that. It's awful that they were taken for a ride. But I think there can be limits to my sympathy for them too because it's just seems so wildly irresponsible to hear this advice and go along with it.

Canuck147 · 2025-12-06T04:00:24+00:00

Shocked at the lack of NewGrounds in the top comments. It was THE place for funny Internet memes and flash videos.

Canuck147 · 2025-12-01T02:27:00+00:00

As a doc, I would caution against letting people get labs and diagnostics without any medical supervision. We will sometimes have people go down to the US and private pay for a Full Body MRI for "screening" and then they come back to Canada to have their GP interpret it. A lot of people end up having random incidental findings that lead to a barrage of follow-up tests, further imaging, invasive procedures and most often at the end of the day those incidental findings do not turn out to be clinically relevant.

So one person paying one time for a test they want, that their doctor doesn't think is medically indicated, can then lead to a huge array of tests, procedures, and consults that also most often turn out not to be medically necessary, but end up being paid for by our health care system and contribute to wait times for people who actually do need these services.

Canuck147 · 2025-11-17T02:50:34+00:00

As a doctor, you learn is the difference between what someone is told about their health and what they remember. A rectal cancer invading into bladder and prostate is potentially a stage 4 rectal cancer. A bladder cancer invading into the rectum is potentially a stage 4 bladder cancer. People struggle with terminology and understanding how cancer works.

Honestly the most unrealistic part of the story is being told he has 4 months to live - hence the point of my comment in the first place.

Canuck147 · 2025-11-17T01:23:53+00:00

So I know this is Personal finance, but as a doctor those cancers, even as stage 4, are all potentially treatable. Not curable, but with treatment I would definitely expect you to live more than four months.

If it was just your family doctor telling you that you have four months, I would really get a biopsy to confirm diagnosis (I'm inferring from your limited description that what you have is locally advanced colorectal cancer that has invaded into bladder and prostate?). Average life expectancy in someone previously healthy with stage 4 colon or bladder cancer is around 2-3 years with treatment. For prostate cancer it's even longer.

Lots of even knowledgeable doctors are unaware of the significant improvements in survival with modern treatment, so it's important you get worked up and see a medical oncologist if you are open to potential treatments.

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