I liked the idea so i asked bing to write a movie synopsis about it. What's fascinating is that bing knew which xkcd comic i was referring to from my horrible description of it. Anyway, here's next year mindless, generic Hollywood blockbuster action movie :
Server Down
Jack Bauer is a nerdy and obsessive system administrator who works in the basement of a high-tech skyscraper. He loves his servers more than anything else, and he will do anything to keep them running smoothly.
When a group of terrorists take over the building and hold the employees hostage, they cut off all communication lines, disable the security cameras, and demand a ransom from the government. But they didn't count on one thing: Jack.
Jack notices that his servers are offline, and decides to take matters into his own hands. He crawls through the ventilation ducts, walks across broken glass, and kills anyone who stands in his way, just to reconnect his servers to the internet. He doesn't care about the hostages, the terrorists, or the ransom. He only cares about his uptime.
But as he reaches the server room, he realizes that he has unwittingly become the only hope for the hostages. The terrorists have planted a bomb in the building, and they are ready to detonate it unless their demands are met. Jack has to use his skills, his gadgets, and his devotion to duty to stop them and save the day. He is the sysadmin, and he is the hero.
Server Down is a thrilling action-comedy that parodies the genre of Die Hard and pays homage to the geek culture. It is a film that celebrates the power of technology, the importance of passion, and the absurdity of heroism.
I'm pretty sure the comic was supposed to be a joke about Die Hard.
If you have any doubts... Observe the goatee.
Bing Chat (so ChatGPT) wrote an opening scene (or maybe more like a trailer, prompt was opening scene) too:
The opening scene of “Server Down” begins with a shot of a high-tech skyscraper. The camera then zooms into the basement of the building, where we see Jack Bauer, a nerdy and obsessive system administrator, working on his servers. He is surrounded by racks of blinking machines, tangled cables, and humming fans. Jack is wearing a t-shirt with a witty tech joke printed on it, and he is sipping a cup of coffee from a “World’s Best Sysadmin” mug.
Suddenly, the lights flicker, and the servers go offline. Jack’s face turns pale, and he drops his coffee mug. He frantically tries to reboot the servers, but nothing works. He checks the network connections, the power supply, and the cooling system, but everything seems fine. He then realizes that the problem is not with his servers, but with the building’s infrastructure. He rushes to the security room, where he finds out that the building has been taken over by terrorists.
The camera then cuts to the terrorists, who are holding the employees hostage and demanding a ransom from the government. They have cut off all communication lines, disabled the security cameras, and planted a bomb in the building. They are confident that they can get away with their plan, but they didn’t count on one thing: Jack Bauer.
The scene ends with Jack staring at the security monitors, his eyes burning with determination. He knows that he has to act fast to save his servers, his colleagues, and himself. He takes a deep breath, puts on his backpack, and heads towards the ventilation ducts. The adventure begins!
[AI generated. NovelAI Euterpe, "hard sci-fi" module, increased randomness]
The opening scene of “Server Down” begins with the sound of a doorbell, and an elderly woman answers it. She is dressed in slacks and a blouse, her hair neatly combed back.
"Good evening," says a young woman who looks not much older than fifty. "May I help you?"
"I'm here to see Mr. Jitendra Gupta." The young woman wears a corporate suit; she must be from an information-technology firm or maybe a security company.
"Mr. Gupta isn't available at the moment. May I take your name?"
"Call me Annette." She shows the woman into the apartment, which is a modest one-bedroom on the ground floor of a three-story building. In the corner there's a bookcase that contains some of the books that Mr. Gupta likes to read: works by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Babel. A chess set sits on top of the bookcase, although it has been unused for weeks. It will remain untouched until late in his life when he finds someone willing to play him. On either side of the room are two black metal cabinets, both of them filled with computer equipment—server racks holding several sets of fiber-optic cables, multiplexers, trays stuffed with silicon chips. Annette glances through each cabinet. "This place looks like an Internet exchange point."
"It is, but I don't have anything to do with the ISPs. My employer does maintenance for them."
"You work for an ISP?"
"No, I'm a freelance specialist."
"Oh, well, then, what exactly is it you do?"
"We fix problems they can't get fixed elsewhere."
She opens a drawer in the bookcase containing books and produces a business card. "Annette Smith, Pico Infotech. If you ever need help with anything, just give us a call. You know how to reach me?"
"Thank you," Mrs. Gupta says. "My husband was very pleased to meet you."In the kitchen, Mr. Gupta is working on a bowl of stew he made earlier. He doesn't look up as Annette enters, although the faint background noise suggests that he has heard her footsteps. His hands move deftly over the controls of a touchscreen display affixed to a workbench above the sink, tapping out commands like a pianist testing notes. He is wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team. His feet rest on a portable footrest, resting on a stool positioned next to the sink.
Mrs. Gupta says, "Can I offer you some tea while you wait? Would you care for a piece of cake?"
"No thanks, dear. I've got something to finish before the end of the shift."
"Would you mind if my guest took a seat?"
"Not at all."
Annette takes a seat facing Mr. Gupta. From where she sits, she has a good view of the screen on the bench. On it, a giant purple octopus is slowly making its way around a 3D map of the solar system. The tentacles are pointing at various objects and then disappearing. When one tentacle reappears, however, it is pointing at a space object of some kind.
"Here we go again," Mr. Gupta murmurs. "The damned thing keeps doing this."
"Is it an asteroid?" asks Annette.
"That's what the news service said last time, but I can't tell from here. Looks like a gas giant to me."
"What about the other three tentacles? Is one of them pointing at Jupiter?"
He rubs his forehead. "Damn it, I wish the news outlet had labeled that image. I want to know why it keeps doing that."
Mrs. Gupta brings in another cup of tea. "Nandu, what are you doing on this screen in the first place? Don't you have a better use for your time?"
"You're asking the wrong person, dear. This is what I do for a living."
On the screen, one of the four tentacles points to Jupiter. Another moves to Mars and disappears. That leaves just the final two tentacles, each of them still pointing at a different destination.
"Maybe it's telling us where it wants to go?" Annette suggests.
"Yeah. Maybe we should ask it."
The fourth tentacle continues to point to Jupiter. One of the remaining tentacles seems to hesitate. Then it changes direction slightly.
"Can you imagine the conversation," Mr. Gupta muses aloud, "if that were really possible?"
"If aliens wanted to talk to us?"
"Sure. How would they send their message?"
"Well, if you want to communicate with anyone on Earth, there's a protocol known as SETI—"
"—which stands for..." Annette trails off.
"The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence," he supplies. "They listen for radio signals at frequencies below 3 gigahertz. They've been listening since the '50s but haven't found any response yet."
"But we already know aliens exist," Mrs. Gupta insists. "There's no doubt in anybody's mind about that."
Annette smiles. She knows it isn't good manners to interrupt, so she waits until Mr. Gupta has finished talking before saying, "Uh... yeah, sure, you could say that."
"Don't you think there's a possibility, even a likelihood, that this octopus is trying to communicate with us?"
Now this is one movie I would watch, no doubt.
Firewall kinda-sorta plays with this idea, but all the tech is pretty stupid (and main focus, if memory serves, isn't even in the technology). It's not a bad movie as a hollywood 13-in-a-dozen action category, but it's a far cry from "Server Down" we have here.
Die Hard: Five Nines
Classic XKCD. I'd pay for a Die Hard version like this.
