I recognize some of the characters:

• Akiyama Yukari from Girls und Panzer (top left corner)
• Oumae Kumiko from Hibike! Euphonium (center – brown hair and yellow eyes)
• Kuriyama Mirai from Beyond the Boundary (right – with glasses)

but I don’t recognize the others.

After I finished watching the series, I discovered that there is a movie version of the story that condenses it down to <2 hours. I haven’t watched it, but that might be a more approachable way for modern viewers to digest the story.

I have seen both (a long time ago), and from what I remember the movie was REALLY different – like, almost unrecognizably different. I do not recommend substituting one for the other.

Wait. The author is 藤本 and the main characters are named 藤野 and 京本? I can guess where 京 comes from. Is there additional significance to 野?

If you really want a setup with that many disks, you might look into Ceph. It’s intended for handling stupidly huge amounts of data spread across multiple servers with self-healing and other nice features. (As the name suggests it’s a bit of a tentacle monster though.) One of my colleagues set up a deployment at work. It took a while for him to figure out how to get it running well but it’s been pretty useful.

It was inevitable; Shrek’s popularity skyrocketed following his surprise cameo in Hunter x Hunter (2011).

It’s from season 1 episode 4 (負けました / We Lost) – about 12 minutes in.