Thursday nights will never be the same (at least until September). After last week’s head-exploding closing line — “Dad?!” — fans of ABC’s cultural phenomenon Scandal have been left with a gaping hole in their social calendars. What to tweet about? What to actually talk about? What’s a gladiator to do without the deliciously over-the-top antics of Olivia Pope and Associates to spice up an otherwise nonscandalous existence?

“I’m thinking about taking up a trade,” joked humor writer and blogger Luvvie Ajayi, whose hilarious Scandal recaps are the stuff of Friday morning legend. “Or learning a new language. Or maybe rocking back and forth from withdrawal because it’s going to be a long summer.”

According to Ajayi, who blogs at AwesomelyLuvvie.com and tweets blow-by-blows of the show to more than 18,000 followers, the show’s summer hiatus will give her more than six hours a week of free time. On Thursdays she spends one hour prepping for the show, then there’s the hour-long show itself, followed by “two hours of cooling off” and two hours of recap-writing time.

“I have all this extra time on my hands,” she said. “Maybe I’ll learn to paint.”

Every week developer Scott Hanselman joins Ajayi for the podcast “Ratchet and the Geek,” covering social media, pop culture and technology. Hanselman, who admits to dipping out of a professional conference early in order to catch last week’s season finale live, is a certified Scandal-head.

“I think that we’re at the beginning of a golden age of television,” he said. “Scandal is just the best. It’s a soap, it’s a telenovela, it’s political scandal, it’s the West Wing meets Nikita all in one.”

In the downtime, Hanselman plans to catch up on other programs featuring the actors starring in his favorite show. “Surprisingly, a large number of them have worked together before, because [Scandal creator and showrunner] Shonda Rhimes pulls from a pool. It’s an incestuous crowd at best. There was a time when there was two weeks of no Scandal when I went and got Django Unchained so that I could see something with Kerry Washington in it.”

Read More Scandal Season 2 Withdrawal: How to Cope.